The Royal Bank of Canada was the sole Canadian bank to make it onto a global ethical reputation ranking, released by Covalence SA today.

The Geneva-based firm published its third annual ranking this morning, placing both the companies it considers best as well as those which have made the most progress in 2007.

Covalence tracks the ethical reputation of multinationals by sourcing information from the media, civil society and companies with the aim of increasing the density of information about sustainable development.

The firm’s proprietary system, EthicalQuote, involves gathering thousands of documents, coding and quantifying them and then synthesizing all the data into curves and volumes.

Last year, the system included 70,000 items from more than 6000 sources, covering a universe of 200 companies within 10 sectors, according to the company.

This year’s banking category included foreign giants HSBC, Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase, HBOS, Barclays, Citigroup, HBOS PLC, Wells Fargo, Wachovia Corp., Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank and UBS.

RBC represented the only Canadian bank included in the ranking. Canada’s largest bank ranked seventh in overall EthicalQuote score, which is essentially the positive news minus negative news cumulated since 2002. RBC also took eighth place in the progress category, which looks at positive news minus negative news for the quarter ending March 31. RBC did not rank in the final category, however, which measures performance by looking only at the positive news from 2008.

In the banking category, HSBC took the top spot in overall score, and Bank of America was ranked number one in both progress and performance.

The company looks at 45 different criteria such as labour standards, waste management, product social utility and human rights policy in order to rank these firms. The company calls its ranking “a barometer of how multinationals are perceived in the ethical field.”