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It’s fair to say that 2020 has been a difficult year for many issuers to navigate, but at First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB), head of group funding Rula AlQadi could afford to be sanguine when the markets closed down in the early stages of the Covid pandemic.

NatWest Markets, part of NatWest Group, has achieved dominant overall market share in sterling for financial institutions, while its breadth of activity has given it a leading role in more complex products that require closer engagement with the buy-side, such as acquisition finance, Libor transition and innovative liability management exercises.

A combination of local presence and global knowledge has long helped Santander Corporate & Investment Banking keep a leading position in Latin America debt capital markets — where it has been in the top five for many years. Santander is now focused on filling out its platform in more of the region’s countries, while its global strengths in environmental, social and governance (ESG) matters and project and infrastructure finance are helping it deliver for the new challenges its clients are facing.

MarketAxess has long been at the forefront of the evolution in emerging markets bond trading and is now spearheading the next changes in the globalisation of the business. Its Open Trading architecture is connecting ever more participants and cutting trading costs, its automated trading innovations are freeing up traders for to do more valuable work, and its roll out of a request-for-market protocol is fundamentally changing market structure across all markets.

GlobalCapital is delighted to announce the winners of its Bond Awards 2020.

GlobalCapital has held its Bond Awards every year for the past 12 years — but never like this. For the first time, we are revealing the winners in a virtual ceremony in September rather than at our London awards dinner in May.

Ireland won kudos for the swift economic recovery that followed the sovereign debt crisis, but with a considerable portion of residential mortgage loans overdue or restructured, its housing market was in a terrible state even before the impact of Covid lockdowns, let alone the peril a disorderly Brexit may bring.

In this round-up, Beijing plans to further ease foreign access to the onshore capital markets, Chinese industrial firms post rising profits and the securities regulator plans to loosen the rules for equity follow-ons.

We all know, or at least Notebook has been led to believe, that once someone obtains money, fame or power, suddenly all sorts of people come out of the woodwork looking to be their friend.

This week in Keeping Tabs: what explains the relative performance of different EU countries and what does this mean for fiscal and monetary policy; why you should brace for US election chaos; and how to harness finance for green purposes.

In this round-up, Xi Jinping reveals plans for the country to become carbon neutral by 2060, FTSE Russell decides to include Chinese government bonds in its flagship index, and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange resumes granting new outbound investment quotas.

The European Central Bank's decision to embrace sustainability-linked bonds (SLBs) as collateral and for its asset purchase programme is a sign of what is to come.