A focus on clients with a strong connection to Switzerland allows the bank to forge particularly close relationships and deliver a quality service.

UBS Americas head says cost of hiring too expensive; fees and salaries based around AuM rather than product.

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.

European wealth managers are battling it out in Asia but North America is where private banking revenues are.

It has not been easy for those without a retail presence to win the affections of America’s wealthy, but UBS – Euromoney’s best bank for wealth management in North America – seems to have done just that. UBS Wealth Management Americas (WMA) this year had its most profitable first quarter in the history of the firm, following record third and fourth quarters in 2016.

Austria’s best bank notched its best result to date last year on the back of a recovery in its emerging Europe operations. But while the group’s international network tended to grab the headlines, the domestic business also put in another strong showing.

Cheap financing helped big M&A deals continue to proliferate in Europe over the period of these awards. Western Europe’s best bank for advisory, UBS, has experience of the pinnacle of the trend for Chinese M&A in Europe, acting on the Swiss side of ChemChina’s $50 billion takeover of Syngenta, which was reaching closure at the end of the awards period. The bank’s work also included a defence against a less attractive offer by Monsanto.

Swiss bank buys Brazil’s biggest multi-family office; wealth management industry continues to grow fast despite economic turbulence.

The top firms this year look like they haven’t moved in 18 years. How can nearly two decades of upheaval appear to have altered the rankings so little in Euromoney’s foreign exchange survey?

Charting the evolution of the FX industry.

Euromoney magazine has released the results of its 39th annual foreign exchange ranking, the most comprehensive quantitative and qualitative annual study available on the FX markets.

Overall market share Overall banks only Overall non-bank liquidity providers only Spot/forward market share Swap market share Options market share Emerging market currencies market share

Cost of equity (COE) dips under return on equity (ROE) as outperformance forecast; long decline in ROE since 2007 seen to have ‘bottomed-out’.

Americas wealth management division partners with specialist investment fund to back tech companies with women at the helm.

Rate hikes, regulation, investing in people and technology – the CEOs of the top ranking private banks in the 2017 Euromoney private banking survey discuss how to balance the challenges and the opportunities that lie ahead.

The hoped-for flows onshore from last year’s amnesty on offshore wealth have failed to materialise, so far. Meanwhile, Citi and HSBC have sold up. So where did a 15% increase in assets under management come from?

UBS Wealth Management voted best global private bank; new regional winners; private banks less bullish on revenues; non-bank competition a minor concern.

With humanity’s challenges seemingly more urgent than ever, the world’s wealthiest are trading cheque-book giving for greater engagement. Not only should the world benefit, but so too those banks that help them with their goals. What role can the world’s leading private banks play?

More than 2,000 private banks took part in the 2017 Euromoney private banking survey. See who’s up and who’s down globally, regionally and by country.

Gender lens investing is on the rise, and with good reason. Not only do companies perform better with greater female representation on their boards, but a multi trillion-dollar wealth transfer to women and millennials means greater investment focus on social issues like diversity.

Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission is investigating UBS for its handling of IPOs. Its licence could be at stake.

UBS moved into its new home at 5 Broadgate last month, the biggest building ever let in central London.

Results index

Results index Global All transactions 2016 2015 Bank Score 1 2 HSBC 6548 2 3 Citi 3830 3 1 Deutsche Bank 3116 4 13 Bank of New York Mellon 1728 5 14 Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation 1536 6 8 JPMorgan 1534 7 5 Commerzbank 1359 8 4 Bank of America Merrill Lynch 1339 9 6 Standard Chartered 1305 10 7 Barclays 1303 11 9 Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ 1209 12 32 Industrial & Commercial Bank of China 1057 13 45 DBS Bank 1045 14 12 Wells Fargo 823 15 11 Bank of China 817 16 19 Societe Generale 721 17 18 Mizuho Bank 692 18 16 UniCredit 607 19 21 ADCB 605 20 15 RBS 535 21 10 BNP Paribas Fortis 504 22 Cathay United Bank 501 23 22 Yapi Kredi 355 24 UOB 352 25 ANZ Banking Group 340 26 23 ING Group 265 27 35= Agricultural Bank of China 251 28 29 Akbank 250 29 17 RZB 223 30 137= Bank Mandiri 218 31 42 Arab Bank 194 32 39 Bank of Communications 193 33 28 UBS 189 34 ATF Bank 188 35 208= Bank Central Asia 182 36 BNI 46 162 37 CIMB 156 38 38 Danske Bank 152 39 65= Banco BPI 144 40 208= Bangkok Bank 132 41 Siam Commercial Bank 126 42 40 Credit Agricole 122 43 34 BBVA 118 44 Hang Seng 116 45 41 Lloyds 114 46= 27 Garanti Bank 110 46= 74= Bancolombia 110 48 Bank Danamon 107 49 NAB 106 50 Bank of Nanjing 103

UK commercial real estate’s post-Brexit shock has proved short-lived, and high-profile gating of investors in a number of UK real estate funds did not precipitate a flood of copy-cat behaviour. But the long-term outlook for investors and lenders in UK real estate remains extremely uncertain.

Results index Swiss bank UBS continues to be the biggest and strongest name in the wealth-management industry, but it scoops the Asia award not just for scale but for its demonstrable resilience and a model tuned to Asian entrepreneurial needs. Asia-Pacific wealth management head Edmund Koh likes to compare UBS to stainless steel: long-lasting, resilient, and nothing really marks it. The last bit hasn’t always been true at a group level, but in private wealth you can see his point: it has remained one of the businesses clients are not only loyal to but tend to gravitate towards when times are tough.

These are miserable times in Australian banking, which is suffering issues ranging from banking culture to credit quality as the commodity cycle ends. Commonwealth Bank has reputational issues around its CommInsure unit, while both ANZ and Westpac are under investigation for rate manipulation.

Results index A firm that looks likely to buck the downward trend among European investment banks on the home continent is UBS. The Swiss bank has continued to recruit in areas crucial to its growth in its corporate client solutions division over the past year. These included M&A, leveraged finance, the UK, as well as sector bankers – building on its long-standing capacity in areas such as equity capital markets and financial-institutions, even if it was slightly behind Barclays for the overall investment banking award this year.

Austrian market leader Erste Bank posted another set of healthy results in 2015 but the standout story of the year, in terms of both growth and profitability, belonged to Bawag PSK. The private equity-owned bank saw its bottom-line result jump by 26% year-on-year to €418 million, giving a sector-beating return on equity of 16.2% on the back of higher core revenues, lower operating expenses and a dramatic reduction in risk costs.