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Some banks talk about “delivering the bank” to clients but that is hard with so many individuals spread across so many teams and reporting lines. Bank of America does things differently. Its debt capital markets structure under Jeff Tannenbaum, head of EMEA DCM and leveraged finance, combines bonds, loans, derivatives, structuring, ESG, liability management and syndicate in a single team.

JPMorgan has topped our poll for the Most Impressive Bank for SSAs for the past five years, a result due on one side to continued investment in the business over a number of years and on the other to the advantage of keeping together what has been one of the most stable coverage teams in the business.

BNP Paribas stood out this year in the euro market for SSAs. In unprecedented market conditions it delivered clients its execution capabilities for the huge increase in funding required, advice around both approaching the market and the new focus on social and sustainable bonds, and its strength in the long end of the curve.

The resurgence of the Maple bond market from its lows since the 2008 financial crisis has delivered a healthy flow of sovereign, supranational and agency borrowers over the last year. RBC Capital Markets has been at the forefront of the revival, delivering some of the year’s biggest transactions and leading the league tables.

Tradeweb has been at the forefront of the development of bond trading for two decades, but it hasn’t stopped evolving as it works with dealers and institutional investors to meet the growing demand for electronification. The SSA market has been a big beneficiary, with rapid take-up of automated trading tools and ever more liquidity available on the platform.

Three factors help explain the success of S&P Global Ratings in its financial institutions business during a year in which the Covid-19 pandemic has created unique challenges for the global banking industry and a huge degree of uncertainty over its future credit performance.

What is striking about BNP Paribas’s FIG business this year is not just the volume of deals, or the landmark transactions it has worked on — and there have been plenty of those — but the diversity of issuer, product and geography.

Natixis has, for more than a decade, had a reputation as one of Europe’s leading covered bond houses. It has won awards as the best euro lead manager, and for covered bond research, while maintaining a top 10, and usually a top five position in the global covered bond league tables. “That strength, however, could turn to be a weakness, when volume in the covered bond markets declines”, says Gabriel Lévy, global head of DCM for financial institutions at Natixis in Paris.

The joined-up approach that BNP Paribas takes to corporate financing came into its own this year, allowing its debt markets teams to better navigate the volatile market and help clients first scrambling for liquidity and then to adapt to the post-crisis economy.

It is hard, if not impossible, to think of a single event that has changed the financial outlook for so many companies as quickly as the Covid-19 pandemic. Corporates, investors and other capital markets participants raced to grasp the implications, putting ratings agencies in the spotlight.

BNP Paribas is no stranger to winning the bank award for Central and Eastern Europe, but this year it has added its first Africa award to its haul. A closely integrated approach that sees the emerging markets team working closely with BNP Paribas’s broader credit businesses — whether that is leveraged finance, the high yield and investment grade debt markets and the growth markets — has been crucial to success, says Fred Zorzi, global head of primary markets.

S&P Global Ratings reorganised its emerging markets effort at the end of 2019, setting up a specialist group that brought together its most senior analysts and economists in 16 countries that it defined as emerging markets across Asia Pacific, EMEA and Latin America.