JPMorgan recorded a hat-trick in the liquidity rankings, but it was all change in many other areas of this year’s Euromoney FX poll.

Latin America’s best bank this year is BBVA. The Spanish-headquartered bank has long been vulnerable to competitors’ claims that it was more a federation than an integrated network of subsidiaries, but the bank’s most recent performance shows that the management – overseen by Jorge Sáenz-Azcúnaga, head of country monitoring at BBVA – has addressed this weakness.

“This pandemic will change a lot of things in terms of how people approach crises in the future,” Martin Mugambi, Citi’s chief executive for Kenya and east Africa, tells Euromoney.

Equity Bank has been involved in healthcare provision in Kenya since 2015, when it established Equity Afia as an integrated, scalable and sustainable healthcare delivery model through its nonprofit foundation.

Kenya’s Equity Bank stands out as a modern financial institution, a domestic champion and a regional player. As a result, it receives this year’s award for Africa’s best bank.

Few banks have undergone as great a transformation over the last four years as PrivatBank. In December 2016, when it was taken over by the state, Ukraine’s biggest bank held more than a third of the country’s retail deposits and boasted 20 million customers.

Singapore’s banks have dominated this award in recent years and for good reason. The super-stable city state boasts a trio of excellent lenders, all geared toward helping its army of small and medium-sized enterprises flourish.

In September 2019 Garanti BBVA signed the world’s first gender loan, a newly designed structure that the bank hopes will encourage its customers to improve their gender equality performance.

At a time of global economic retrenchment, dollar volatility, slowing trade flows and border closures, Africa needs deeper localization of markets and financing. Standard Bank’s expertise in these fields makes it the clear choice for best investment bank in Africa this year.

It isn’t easy being a very big bank with a very big presence in very big markets. Citi is a big financial institution present in virtually every large Asian economy. You don’t get to be this size and to last this long without an innate ability to react smartly and nimbly to systemic threats.

Year after year, HSBC quietly gets on with the key business of delivering crucial funding to clients whether they are looking to refinance debt, acquire an asset or rival, or just bulk up their balance sheet in the face of a once-in-a-century global pandemic.

As the Middle East enters a new phase of development, one in which governments can no longer rely on endless petrodollars and in which economies built on global trade and travel will have to adapt to survive, it will need banks with outstanding M&A and advisory capabilities. Citi is such a bank.

The best bank for financing in the region is Goldman Sachs.

Standard Bank’s investment in switching its trade processes from manual to digital has paid off this year, with faster processes stemming from better technology. It is the best bank for transaction services in Africa as a result. Its head of transactional products and services is Hasan Khan.

First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB) developed its sustainability framework in 2017 under four pillars: sustainable banking, being a responsible employer, having a positive social impact and excellence in governance, integrity and risk management.

As the biggest retail bank in a country where cash usage is lower than other big European states and where cloud-based neobanks have particular traction, Lloyds Banking Group faces an unusual digital banking challenge.

The vital role for UK corporate clients played by Barclays was clearer than ever during the coronavirus crisis: the bank arranged £9.9 billion of commercial paper issuance under the Bank of England’s Covid Corporate Financing Facility, almost half of the total.

“I think this crisis has shown why being with a firm focused on wealth management as a primary business and having a global perspective matters to clients,” says Tom Naratil, co-chief executive of UBS global wealth management (GWM) and president of UBS Americas.

When Euromoney met the head of retail banking at Ping An Bank, Xinfa Cai, in September 2019, he talked of his desire to hear his employer mentioned, in terms of its dedication to innovation and service, in the same breath as the likes Taobao and JD.com, two of China’s biggest and best digitally driven corporates.

Under the leadership of chief executive Rodolfo Tabash, BAC International has developed a regional response to the Covid-19 crisis, bringing together a multi-jurisdictional, multi-disciplinary committee to harmonize its response and ensure best practice is used throughout its Credomatic operations in central America.

Another brisk year of M&A deal flow in CEE produced a clear winner on the advisory side. The best bank for advisory, Citi, dominated Dealogic’s league tables for the 12 months to the end of March, acting on 17 deals worth $17.7 billion, versus just $9.5 billion for its nearest rival.

It’s hard to find a more comprehensive and cutting-edge offering in wealth management across Africa than that of Standard Bank, which is why the bank wins the award for best bank for wealth management in Africa once again.

Western Europe’s best investment bank, BNP Paribas, is increasingly central to capital markets across the continent. That’s been particularly clear since the onset of the coronavirus crisis.

While it was hard before, the Covid-19 pandemic will make it almost impossible for most European banks to earn their cost of equity any time soon.

HSBC retains its title as the Middle East’s best bank for transaction services for the second year running by stepping up to the challenge of helping customers trade and transact at a time of closed borders and supply-chain disruption.

Societe Generale has long been active in promoting finance for small and medium-sized enterprises in Africa.

Over the past decade Poland’s banks have consistently been at the head of the pack in Europe in terms of digitalization.

Banking small and medium-sized enterprises is challenging in any market, particularly at the smaller end of the scale. It is even more so in Turkey, where the market is distorted by the predominance of large state-owned banks focused more on pumping up the economy with cheap credit than on commercial imperatives.

To the detractors of big Wall Street banks, Goldman Sachs might not seem an obvious candidate for recognition of its response to a humanitarian crisis. But when the Covid-19 crisis struck, the bank rapidly deployed a raft of measures spanning frontline support for hospitals to online versions of its community volunteering programmes.

Canada’s biggest bank is a regular winner of the award for Canada’s best investment bank, but in 2020 it has clocked up another accolade for the first time since 2004.