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Awards for Excellence 2020

About the Awards for Excellence

Euromoney's Awards for Excellence are the awards that matter to the banks and bankers who matter. They were established in 1992 and were the first of their kind in the global banking industry. This year Euromoney received almost 1,000 submissions from banks in our regional and country awards programme that covers more than 50 regional awards and best bank awards in close to 100 countries.

Global
Africa
Asia
CEE
LATAM
MIDEAST
N. America
W. Europe

Best Bank

  • Awards for Excellence
    It was not the only bank that came into the Covid crisis with a strong balance sheet, but, as in 2008, the bank has shown that its diverse businesses provide plentiful earnings to take big reserves, even while it keeps financing large corporates and small businesses alike. Deposits have flooded in, technology investments have proved their worth and it is winning more business from mid-cap clients inside and outside the US – and it coped with the temporary absence of a legendary chief executive.
  • Awards for Excellence
    JPMorgan was not the only bank that came into the Covid crisis with a strong balance sheet, but, as in 2008, the bank has shown that its diverse business lines and fortress balance sheet are what distinguishes it from the pack.

Best Investment Bank

Excellence in Leadership

  • Awards for Excellence
    The new chief executive of HSBC had announced a big cost-cutting programme just before Covid hit. He was smart enough to pause it and encourage local staff around the world, even in locations where the redundancies were set to fall, to back their customers with quick loan decisions. Noel Quinn discusses the bank’s impressive response.
  • Awards for Excellence
    Thomas Gottstein looked uncertain when stepping up to succeed Tidjane Thiam in February, but his response to the pandemic, including a scheme with the government, central bank and other lenders to save Swiss SMEs, demonstrated why he was appointed. He is now reshaping the bank Thiam handed over to him.

Banker of the Year

Lifetime Achievement

Global Awards

Best Bank

Best Investment Bank

Excellence in Leadership

  • Awards for Excellence
    Societe Generale has long been active in promoting finance for small and medium-sized enterprises in Africa.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Awards for Excellence
    “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.
  • 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.
  • Awards for Excellence
    Deutsche Bank’s commitment to Africa’s economic development began long before the Covid-19 pandemic struck, but the bank’s expertise in infrastructure and structured finance will be essential in supporting the continent’s recovery and in helping to address the long-term concerns holding back development.

Regional Awards

  • Awards for Excellence
    Ghana’s banking sector went through severe challenges in 2018 after the central bank’s asset quality review in 2017 revealed several structural challenges, including poor corporate governance, poor risk-management practices and regulatory non-compliance.
  • Awards for Excellence
    Micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) are the backbone of the Nigerian economy. A survey carried out in 2018 by the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics estimated there are over 41 million firms with 199 employees or fewer in Nigeria, accounting for almost 50% of GDP. MSMEs provide almost 60 million jobs, equal to 86% of the national workforce.
  • Awards for Excellence
    Kenya’s Equity Bank stands out for its digital offering, and is poised to take advantage of the coronavirus-fuelled pivot towards cashless banking.
  • Awards for Excellence
    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.
  • Awards for Excellence
    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.
  • Awards for Excellence
    With Africa and the world expected to enter a protracted period of low growth, more companies will need to restructure and M&A will become a more dominant trend in the region. Over the last 12 months, Citi has demonstrated its expertise in these fields in Africa and it is Euromoney’s best bank for advisory in Africa this year.
  • Awards for Excellence
    Standard Chartered’s contribution to the development of African markets this year was shown in several transformational infrastructure deals, including Tanzania’s light railway and a huge offshore oil drilling rig in Angola. This contribution makes it Euromoney’s best bank for financing in Africa.
  • Awards for Excellence
    “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.
  • Awards for Excellence
    Citi has the largest presence of any global bank in Africa – active in over 40 countries, with offices in 16 of those. The bank excels at capacity building and innovation, working with a vast array of partnerships with government, government agencies, fintechs, local financial institutions, consumer goods companies, social enterprises and nonprofits.

country awards

Best Bank

Best Investment Bank

Excellence in Leadership

  • Prime Bank has barely paused during the Covid-19 crisis. The Dhaka-based bank was an early mover on coronavirus in south Asia, raising awareness of the pandemic among employees as early as January 30.
  • The London-headquartered lender has its roots and its future in Asia, and from the outset it was keen to provide staunch support to its customers across the region. It has been everywhere throughout the Covid-19 crisis, playing, in the words of chief executive Noel Quinn, a “massive role” in supporting communities and helping restore economic growth.
  • 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.
  • What CB Bank did right in the early days of Covid-19 was to recognize that the main pressure facing its customers was a shortage of cash.
  • Supported by helpful regulators, many Asian lenders adapted well to the pandemic. Hong Leong Bank (HLB) was no exception. The Kuala Lumpur-based lender donated to local NGOs and delivered food parcels to the needy during Ramadan.
  • When Singapore suffered a second spike in coronavirus cases in April, attention turned to the city state’s migrant labourers, an army of essential workers described by a former head of the National University of Singapore’s Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health as society’s “most invisible” members.

Regional Awards

  • DBS takes the award for Asia’s best bank for transaction services this year.
  • In a region where the greatest amount of wealth is in the hands of entrepreneurs, it is a ‘bank for entrepreneurs’ that many of those wealthy individuals need and that is Credit Suisse. It wins the award this year for Asia’s best bank for wealth management.
  • Since joining Habib Bank in early 2018 as president and chief executive, former JPMorgan banker Muhammad Aurangzeb has transformed the Pakistan-based lender from the ground up.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • The list of deals from 2019 and 2020 – green bonds, social bonds, sustainability bonds and ESG-linked loans – goes on and on for HSBC in Asia under Jonathan Drew, managing director, sustainable finance.
  • It is hard to find a bank with greater integrity than DBS. Its commitment to responsible banking, sustainable finance, running a responsible business and creating social impact are obvious; and this year it wins the award for Asia’s best bank for corporate responsibility.
  • Morgan Stanley rarely seems to put a foot wrong in Asia. As ever, it seemed to be everywhere last year, a key player on the deals that mattered most.

Country awards for excellence

Best Bank

Best Investment Bank

Excellence in Leadership

  • Santander has been one of the most innovative groups in the world in its response to the Covid-19 outbreak, and its Polish subsidiary is no exception.
  • Kazakhstan’s banks faced a difficult challenge in the first two months of the pandemic. When president Kassym-Jomart Tokayev announced a state of emergency on March 16, he also unveiled plans to provide a support payment of KT42,500 ($106) to all citizens economically affected by the pandemic.
  • Businesses and banks in Belarus have faced a particularly tough challenge during the Covid-19 crisis due to the refusal of the government not only to impose any national restrictions but also to acknowledge the risks of the pandemic and implement any measures to mitigate its economic impact.

Regional Awards

  • Center-Invest Bank became the first Russian bank to issue a green bond with its R250 million ($3.56 million) offering in November last year. It was a natural step for a bank that has been committed to the environment and responsible banking from its inception.
  • Keeping supply chains functioning is essential for the success of CEE’s open, globally connected economies, and the banks best-placed to do so are those that combine deep local knowledge with international expertise.
  • The pandemic and following market crisis during 2020 has seen many high net-worth individuals across central and eastern Europe return to the safety and security of large international banks. Among those benefiting from this flight to safety has been Credit Suisse, which has seen increases in net new assets over the first few months of the year.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Societe Generale’s footprint in CEE has changed dramatically over the last four years. At the start of 2016, the French group had one of the largest banking networks in the region, covering 13 countries from Albania to Georgia.
  • Over the past decade Poland’s banks have consistently been at the head of the pack in Europe in terms of digitalization.
  • 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.

country awards

Best Bank

Best Investment Bank

Excellence in Leadership

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Banreservas responded to the national state of emergency brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic by working closely with the Dominican Republic’s authorities and the central bank to keep the banking system liquid and avoid corporate insolvencies.

Regional Awards

country awards

Best Bank

Best Investment Bank

Excellence in Leadership

Regional Awards

  • Under the stewardship of chief executive Jean-Christophe Durand, formerly head of BNP Paribas’s Middle East and Africa operations, National Bank of Bahrain (NBB) embarked on a radical transformation programme in 2017 that delivered impressive results during the awards period.
  • A great deal of resources have been dedicated to small and medium enterprises in Saudi Arabia as the kingdom looks to increase SME’s contribution to GDP from 20% to 35% under its Vision 2030 programme.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • The Middle East is a hard market in which to be truly sustainable, given the vast amount of money in the region that is tied to oil now and will be for some time.
  • 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.
  • “During the first quarter our assets increased by 15% due to net new money, transaction revenues are up year over year 55%, our lending share has grown 25% compared to a year ago and our costs are down 1%,” says Ali Janoudi, head of Middle East and Africa for wealth management at UBS.
  • First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB) is the number one bank for loans in the Mena region, with a 15.5% market share, arranging some 160 transactions including $5 billion of syndicated loans from April 2019 to March 2020. But it has also won numerous debt capital markets mandates across the region.
  • The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the move towards cashless economies as governments advise against the use of cash because of its role as a vector for the virus. That has left many financial institutions scrambling to upgrade their systems.

country awards

The US's Best Bank

Canada's Best Bank

The US's Best Investment Bank

Canada's Best Investment Bank

Excellence in Leadership

  • As of late June 2020, Citi, together with its charitable Citi Foundation, had committed some $100 million to Covid-19 relief efforts. While the targets of its aid are varied, the bank has made a special focus on supporting people and communities of colour, recognizing the disproportionate impact the pandemic has had on these communities.
  • 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.
  • Community Development Finance Institutions (CDFIs) play a unique role in the US, but they were not included in the earliest Covid-19 stimulus packages. So it was vital that big banks helped them to reach those that needed loans the most.
  • 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.

Regional Awards

  • It was a year of milestones for Morgan Stanley in sustainability, a journey that began in 2013 with the establishment of the Sustainable Investing Institute under Audrey Choi, the bank’s chief sustainability officer.
  • “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.
  • There’s practically nothing that a North American small to medium-sized enterprise might want to do that Bank of America won’t be able to help with. Its strategy, built around six service areas, has been enduringly constant for five years, and it again wins the award for North America’s best bank for SMEs.
  • 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.
  • The North American mergers and acquisitions advisory business has one obvious volume leader most years. This year is no different, but that doesn’t mean nothing else changes.
  • When a big US bank joins its peers around the world under an umbrella of responsible banking, it lifts the entire responsibility agenda – and this is exactly what Citi has done as an early signatory to the Principles of Responsible Banking (PRB) of the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative.
  • Bank of America is the undisputed leader in transaction services in North America. Long before the coronavirus crisis struck its home market, the bank had entered the Euromoney awards period with strong momentum. But by the end of that period it was being called upon to deploy all its leadership to help businesses across the US.
  • In November 2019, AbbVie priced a $30 billion, 10-tranche bond that was the fourth-largest corporate bond ever. The trade, which backed AbbVie’s acquisition of Allergan, wrapped up an extraordinary financing package by Morgan Stanley.

Best Bank

Best Investment Bank

Excellence in Leadership

Regional Awards

country awards

AFE 2020 logo.png
Euromoney's Regional and Country Awards for Excellence 2020 were published on July 15 and appear in the July/August issue of Euromoney magazine. The Global Awards were announced on September 10 and feature in the September issue.

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