Regina Longo Sanchez Itaú BBA First-place appearances: 1

Total appearances: 4

Team debut: 2011 Dropping back to second place on this lineup after a year at No. 1 is Regina Longo Sanchez of Itaú BBA, who reports on 16 Brazilian banking names from her base in São Paulo. She credits the sector’s strong performance in the first half of 2014 — it gained 10 percent, while the broad market was flat — to “a combination of positive quarterly results, recovery in the banks’ margins and the reduction in risk perception, due to the lower aggressiveness of the state-owned banks.” The researcher forecasts continued outperformance and expects to see ongoing improvements in the institutions’ margins, along with resilient profitability and an absence of material asset quality deterioration. Her favorite name is São Paulo–based Banco Bradesco, which is the country’s second-largest private sector lender, because she expects margins to benefit from higher interest rates and an easing of competition from its public sector counterparts.