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The best bank for financing award will surprise those who set great store in league tables – but maybe they have been looking at the wrong league tables. While Credit Suisse is not a leader in volume terms, and in some areas is far from it, Dealogic data show that it is one of the most profitable houses across investment banking. In fact during the awards period, if Australia is added to ex-Japan Asia, no house made more from public deals in the region.

Morgan Stanley dominated M&A league tables during our review period, but winning the best bank for advisory award is about more than scale. What is more impressive is the way Morgan Stanley has put itself at the heart of the central trends of Asia-Pacific M&A, usually getting itself on to the lucrative sell side along the way.

For almost 50 years, Euromoney has been the leading publication for covering the growth of international finance. Over the past 12 months its coverage has included interviews with close to 100 bank CEOs, ministers of finance and central bank governors around the world.

Euromoney has never before given an award in Afghanistan, but the story of Azizi Bank is compelling. Formed by an ethnic business group in 2006 and owned by Dubai’s Azizi Group, it took over the Development Bank of Afghanistan from the central bank in 2009, then India’s Punjab National Bank in 2014. It is Afghanistan’s largest commercial bank, with more than 140 branches and a million customers, and employs 2,300 people, 17% of them women, which does not sound a lot but matters in Afghanistan.

It is genuinely impossible to have a conversation with anyone at DBS without it turning swiftly to digital initiatives. Whether it is a transaction services or an SME banker across the table, capital markets or even CSR, and most certainly if it is CEO Piyush Gupta, it is clear that the digital agenda pervades everything DBS does, which makes it a worthy winner of this year’s best digital bank. DBS is not alone in this, but it is the one bank that convinces you that its use of technology is not just about marketing and simplification, but is translating into profits and new business.

The best investment bank in Asia awards was one of the easier ones to decide upon. Morgan Stanley had an outstanding year in advisory and equity capital markets, and held its own in debt.

Vantiv's deal to buy Worldpay may be only the first of a number of high-profile takeovers in the payments industry as a fragmented market looks for global answers.

No matter where head office is based, Euromoney’s best regional bank, HSBC, is fundamentally about Asia. In 2016, the region contributed $10.6 billion out of global profit before tax of $17.3 billion – two thirds of the pie.

No merger is easy, but the combination of Hana Bank and the former Korea Exchange Bank to form KEB Hana faced more challenges than most. KEB has been a troubled asset for more than a decade, with suitors from DBS to HSBC all deterred or rejected over the years. It was sold by US private equity firm Lone Star to Hana in 2012, but it took three more years for Hana to strike an agreement with KEB’s powerful union on a merger between the two institutions.

A visit to the executive dining floor at Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Bryant Park headquarters in Manhattan is always a pleasure.

Asia-based payment wallet fintechs like to boast that they involve themselves in every area of a customer’s life.