OREANDA-NEWS.  The first place in Bloomberg's TOP 20 for the second consecutive year is won by Hong Kong based Hang Seng Bank. Japanese Norinchukin Bank has scored the second place and Oversea-Chinese Banking from Singapore came in third.

Bloomberg has nominated Finland's OP Financial Group as Europe's strongest bank, putting SEB in the second position and Swedbank in the third.

Six Asian banks and six European banks have made the list as well as five North American banks and three banks from Middle East.

From Europe also the Swedish Swedbank (12th place) and Svenska Handelsbanken (19th place) as well as Swiss UBS (17th place) and Credit Suisse Group (20th place) have secured a spot in Bloomberg's TOP 20 of world's strongest financial institutions.

Bloomberg experts have noted that Swedish banks have shown the highest capitalization ratios. At the end of 2014, SEB had a 19.5 Tier 1 capital ratio, a low ratio of nonperforming assets and a high level of profitability with 15.3% return on equity.

In 2014 Bloomberg named SEB as the 9th strongest bank while in 2013 SEB was in 14th position.

Bloomberg has compared banks with at least $100 billion assets by reviewing their ratios of tier 1 capital to risk-weighed assets, non-performing assets to total assets, loan-loss reserves to non-performing assets, deposits to funding and efficiency.

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