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In February 2020 BofA Securities reorganized its corporate and investment banking teams in Latin America, with Augusto Urmeneta becoming head of corporate and investment banking. At that time Hans Lin, head of Brazil investment banking – a key market for the bank and one in which it has excelled – joined the bank’s global private capital council. Meanwhile Bruno Saraiva was named co-head of Brazil investment banking alongside Lin, who remains in charge of the ECM team.

This year BofA Securities, led by Augusto Urmeneta, head of investment banking in Latin America, topped the equity capital markets volume and fee tables across the region, as well as being first in fees and second in terms of volume for M&A.

The region's best banks, country by country

Numbers don’t tell you everything, but sometimes they shout pretty loud. Apac profits for UBS Global Wealth Management grew from $560 million in 2019 to $1.1 billion in 2020; a near doubling of profitability in the middle of a pandemic. Along the way invested assets in the region passed the $500 billion mark for the first time, hitting $560 billion by the end of the year, with $25 billion of net new money.

The region's best banks, country by country

With a unique reach into the small and medium-sized enterprise, and mass affluent segments in central and eastern Europe, as well as a long tradition of wealth management in its Austrian home market, Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI) is ideally positioned to play a leading role in private banking in the region.

ESG has surged in importance as a financing theme in Latin America over the past 12 months. Financial institutions of all sizes and types have been scrambling to emphasize how the components of ESG are now core to business strategy. It’s often hard to see through the messaging, but that’s not the case with Santander. The bank is truly a leader in embedding sustainable finance in the business. Its group executive chairman Ana Botín has championed the bank’s net-zero carbon ambitions, but it’s under the leadership of Santander’s group chief executive, Jose Antonio Álvarez, that the bank has become a sustainability leader in Latin America.

It wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration to say that no other investment bank can operate across the central America and Caribbean region like Citi. With its history and presence, the US bank seems to have a stranglehold on deal flow from the region and Citi’s investment banking team, led by Caribbean and central America cluster head Marcelo Gorrini, has been dominant in the awards period.

Santander has spent four years catching up with local and regional rivals that were quicker to adapt to mobile banking. In 2017 it saw itself as the leading bank in Spain but found its app ranked 13th in the country. The bank’s leaders, under executive chairman Ana Botín, realized they had to transform Santander and give key senior executives specific responsibility.

At a time when sustainability issues are rising in importance for all South African banks, Nedbank has led the way in terms of its commitment to environment, social and governance goals. This green agenda is vital in a country that is prone to drought, is Africa’s biggest polluter, heavily reliant on coal for its electricity and in desperate need of a rapid increase in its power generation capacity.

The financing category offers us three models to consider. Firms like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley show greater strength in equity than debt. Others, notably Credit Suisse and Deutsche, do interesting and creative things in the debt markets, sometimes with careful use of the balance sheet, but tend to appear less in league tables.

When Covid began to close in on southeast Asia in 2020, UOB didn’t wait. In February 2020, before any government support and before much of the west had even acknowledged there was a virus to worry about, UOB announced S$3 billion of relief assistance to SME clients.