Nine merchants opened Kuwait’s first national bank in 1952

An Amiri decree of 19 May 1952 incorporated the National Bank of Kuwait, and on 15 November that year it began trading as a Kuwaiti shareholding company. The bank’s own published account calls it the first national bank in Kuwait and the Gulf, and the first joint stock company in either.

What existed before it

Only the British Bank of the Middle East, whose Kuwait branch was formally inaugurated in February 1942, in the middle of the war. HSBC, which absorbed that bank, dates its Kuwait branch to 1942 as well.

A capital counted in rupees

The bank was incorporated with 13.1 million rupees, divided into 13,100 shares of a thousand rupees each. The dinar did not yet exist; the rupee was the currency of the country, and the bank today puts that sum at one million dinars.

Three shops and a handful of staff

It opened in a small building on what was then called the new street, in a space no bigger than three shops, with a staff the bank describes as no more numerous than the fingers of a hand. The first business was plain: letters of credit, currency exchange, simple transfers, deposits and withdrawals.

The nine

The bank names its founders as Ahmed Saud Al-Khaled, Khalid Zaid Al-Khalid, Khaled Abdullatif Al-Hamad, Khalifa Khalid Al-Ghunaim, Sayed Ali Sayed Sulieman Al-Rifai, Abdulaziz Hamad Al-Sager, Mohamed and Abdulmohsen Al-Khorafi, Yousef Ahmed Al-Ghanim and Yousef Abdulaziz Al-Fulaij. They took the proposal to Sheikh Abdullah Al-Salem Al-Sabah, who backed it.

Nine years separated that November from independence. The bank describes itself as having reached economic independence before the country reached political independence.

Photograph: an Indian one-rupee note issued in 1957; the rupee was Kuwait’s currency before the dinar. Photograph by Awmcphee, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: National Bank of Kuwait, “68 years of leadership and growth” in its newsroom on nbk.com; HSBC Global Archives and HSBC Kuwait.