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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.

The region's best banks, country by country

DBS’s digital capability was tested to the core by Covid, and it not only stepped up but turned the situation to its advantage. From consumer to institutional, DBS used the opportunity to convert clients to digital channels, benefiting from improved economics as it did so. Before long the government was counting on the bank to disburse emergency payments to those under stress.

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.

HSBC retains the award for best bank for transaction services for the third straight year thanks to its ability to adapt to the pandemic and the rapidly changing needs of regulators and its customers. In the Middle East that means being there when it matters. The bank processed $552 billion in payments and $54 billion in trade for 15,000-plus clients last year.

For the first time since 2014, the award for Asia’s best investment bank goes to Goldman Sachs.

Although the biggest universal banks regularly appear higher up the M&A advisory league tables by transaction value, Rothschild & Co works on far more deals than any competitor. According to Dealogic it advised on 222 deals in the 12 months under review compared with Goldman Sachs’s 132.

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.

East African banks have led the way in SME financing in Africa and none more so than Equity Bank. Nigerian banks often struggle to get to a double-digit percentage allocation of their loan books to SMEs. That’s partly due to a less diversified, oil-dependent economy. But even by east African standards, Equity Bank is impressive. Most of its loan book (54%) is with SME clients.

In a bumper year for Eurobond issuance, JPMorgan once again demonstrated the unrivalled breadth and depth of its debt capital markets franchise in central and eastern Europe.

Amid the scramble for cash during the pandemic lockdowns, efficient treasury management was key to ensuring that companies made the most of the liquidity already available to them, minimizing the need for, and cost of, emergency measures. Corporates looked to free up otherwise trapped liquidity through techniques such as cash pooling, either through physical sweeping or – as the imperative to go digital mounts – through virtual accounts.