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Banco Lafise takes the award for the region’s best bank for small and medium-sized enterprises this year because of the adaptation of its 2021 growth model to an SME-centric approach – in line with its home market’s biggest needs.

Turkish banks are known across Europe for their advances in digital banking. This is often attributed to a relative lack of legacy IT infrastructure, but it’s also due to early investments in digital banking, as well as factors such as a younger retail base in the home market.

BofA Securities has had a busy year in which it demonstrated impressive breadth of deal-flow across countries, as well as regional leadership in two of the main product areas. Not only was the bank the best investment bank in Colombia and Peru, but it was also a close challenger for the Mexican and Brazilian awards. It is this unmatched geographical balance that makes BofA the region’s leading investment bank.

Despite its growth into one of biggest banks in Romania, small and medium-sized enterprises remain core to the strategy of Banca Transilvania and SMEs constitute a large proportion of its lending. In 2021, its SME loan portfolio reached L19.2 billion ($4.06 billion), with L3.7 billion of new loans during the year, reaching 18,000 SMEs and micro-enterprises.

Greater support for capital-light investment banking business at UniCredit since the arrival of Andrea Orcel as chief executive in early 2021 is fostering a change in mindset in the firm’s advisory franchise. The region’s best bank for advisory also brought support in terms of product and sector expertise thanks to hires in Munich and Milan. That’s adding to the bank’s existing advantages in terms of geographic coverage, which includes around 50 M&A bankers spread across eight central and eastern European markets.

Now, hear us out. A year ago, we were griping about Citi’s decision to sell consumer businesses in a clutch of Asian markets. The only way it made sense, we argued, was if Citi put its money where its mouth is: deployed the freed capital into its wealth and institutional businesses in Asia and doubled down on that with tangible action, rather than the proceeds just drifting into some vague balance-sheet objective.

Best Bank: BTG Pactual

While the main story of the 2022 Latin America awards is the emergence of BTG Pactual as a retail force, the bank’s senior management team, headed by chief executive Roberto Sallouti, clearly hasn’t let the investment banking team take its eye off the ball.

With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine threatening vital energy supplies to central and eastern Europe, sustainable finance initiatives – especially in renewable energy – are more important than ever. Regional banks are increasingly focusing on sustainable finance and this year the bank that stands out is ING, CEE’s best bank for sustainable finance.

The successful growth of BAC International Bank throughout central America and the Caribbean region led to the bank being spun off from parent Banco de Bogotá. Although the bank is no longer part of this group – it has its own listing in Panama – the primary shareholders remain Banco de Bogotá and Luis Carlos Sarmiento Angulo, chief executive of Grupo Aval.

BTG Pactual’s recent success has been based in large part on the digital platform that it has built in recent years. The bank targets opportunities where financial deepening, disintermediation and technological adoption intersect in Latin America.

Wealth management in central and eastern Europe is undergoing a period of rapid and fundamental reorientation after the invasion of Ukraine and the accompanying international financial isolation of Russia.