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.

The coordination of the financial response to the coronavirus crisis has sometimes seemed easier in France than elsewhere in Europe.

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.

The Covid-19 crisis has emphasized the importance of banks that can stand by their clients and bring them funding in the toughest times. Euromoney’s best bank for financing in Western Europe, BNP Paribas, has stepped up to a greater extent than peers, especially on a pan-European level – although its achievements this year go beyond the coronavirus response.

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented change to the way that business is carried out in Africa. For those banks central to supply-chain management and trade finance, the need to maintain the flow of food, essential goods and personal protection equipment despite border closures is critical.

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.

“People think the role of a bank is giving money, but actually what a bank does is build systems,” says Carl Manlan, chief operating officer of the Ecobank Foundation.

Cyprus’s strict approach to tackling the coronavirus has meant the health crisis has been much less severe there than in many other states in Europe.

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.

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.

One of the first things Nigeria’s Guaranty Trust Bank did with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic was to get in touch with local authorities to see how the bank could help. Recognizing that the fragile public healthcare system would struggle to cope with the predicted number of patients, it offered to set up a care facility for people with Covid-19.

This year Vision Banco wins the award for Latin America’s best bank for corporate responsibility.

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.

To succeed, you have to be national: for Bill Demchak, chief executive of PNC Financial Services, it’s the mantra that has guided his strategy since taking over the reins of the firm in 2013.

Across sustainable finance and microfinance, BBVA is working to support greener and more inclusive economies. It wins the award for best bank in Latin America for sustainable finance.

When the Covid-19 pandemic reached Qatar and foreign exchange houses were forced to close, a customer contacted Commercial Bank of Qatar (CB) with concerns that his domestic workers were no longer able to send critical remittance payments to families in their home countries.

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.

HSBC has been central to maintaining imports of vital goods into the region, even while national borders slammed shut.

Citi worked hard to mitigate the effects of the pandemic throughout central and Latin America and, given its history and geographical spread throughout the region, its impact was widespread.

If there is one thing that will test a bank’s digital and technology platform it is a global pandemic. The investment that Bank of America has put into all of its digital offerings over the last few years became truly apparent over the first few months of 2020; and it wins the award for North America’s best digital bank.

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.

Quantity was never in doubt with Citi – every year, its capital markets team churn out the deals. When it adds quality to the mix, and an ability to innovate, it’s unbeatable.

The 2020 award for the best bank for advisory goes to BR Partners. It is an outstanding growth story: the investment bank boutique was opened just 10 years ago by founder and chief executive Ricardo Lacerda, previously of Citi and Goldman Sachs in Brazil.

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.

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

Emirates NBD has excelled in all elements of its response to the Covid-19 pandemic, from steps taken to protect the health of its employees to loan deferrals for its customers; but what really stands out is the bank’s commitment to its community.

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.

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.

As the sixth-largest bank in North America by branches, TD Bank Group penetrates deep into the Canadian and US markets. It deployed massive support to retail and corporate clients in both countries as the coronavirus crisis took hold.

This year the region’s best investment bank is JPMorgan. In a highly competitive year, the US bank claims the award because of the unrivalled breadth of its mandates across investment banking products, as well as its dominance in many of the region’s countries.