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In a market of more than 5,000 banks, competition in the US is fierce. But among the clutch of sizeable regional banks, one firm has seen a remarkable transition since its IPO in 2014, under the steady leadership of chief executive Bruce Van Saun. Citizens wins the award for the US’s best bank.

No other wealth manager comes close to competing with UBS for this award. Again, the Swiss banking giant demonstrated its commitment to the region. During the awards period, it relocated its Dubai office to the heart of the Emirate’s financial district and opened a new wealth management office in Doha. UBS aims to hire about 20 people in Qatar by the end of 2020, but it has already made its biggest personnel move, bringing Tarek Eido from HSBC to oversee its onshore wealth business. Eido will report to head of wealth management, Middle East and Africa, Ali Janoudi.

Not the biggest but the most profitable. That’s the strategy of Guaranty Trust Bank (GTBank) and it’s one that – with a return on average equity of 28.5% in 2020 – it is clearly achieving among its banking competitors in its home country Nigeria and also across Africa.

Evaluating wealth management capabilities between banks isn’t straightforward because so much of the service verges on the intangible. However, this year there was a hard number that seemed solid enough on which to base the decision. Between the first quarters of 2020 and 2021 XP Private grew its assets under custody by 263% to R$240 billion.

It was another stellar period for Morgan Stanley’s financing franchise. The bank’s equity and debt capital markets businesses turned in a strong performance for clients, many of whom were using it to finance deals on which the bank was providing mergers and acquisitions advice. And as it did last year, the firm wins the award for North America’s best bank for financing.

Banco Pan’s unlikely transformation into a force in digital retail banking in Brazil began in 2010 with a $1.4 billion accounting fraud. The owner, Silvio Santos, a well-known media figure in Brazil, was forced to offload the bank (then called Banco Panamericano and specializing in car financing) to a partnership of state-owned Caixa Economica and investment bank BTG Pactual.

It’s not often any bank sits above JPMorgan in an important financing league table, but BNP Paribas far outstrips the US bank as a bookrunner both of syndicated loans and of debt capital markets deals for borrowers in western Europe.

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.

The region's best banks, country by country

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.

No regional lender comes close to competing with Mashreq Bank for the best digital bank award. Under group chief executive Ahmed Abdelaal and head of corporate and investment banking Joel Van Dusen, the Dubai-based lender has become not just a powerhouse in digital but a leader too. It continues to invest heavily in blockchain. Its Trade Tracker platform allows corporates to track all transactions in real time and to view them all in a single window. TradeFursaa sucks in data from the bank’s business lines, then uses AI and big data to identify opportunities for traders and exporters.

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.