Mouhammed Choukeir

Spear’s Review

Kleinwort Hambros was created in 2016 when French banking giant Société Générale acquired Kleinwort Benson and merged it with its subsidiary SG Hambros, which it had already acquired in 1998.

The merger was historic but not without its shakeups, as it saw two leaders stepping down successively. Then CIO Mouhammed Choukeir was appointed as its third CEO in two years, at the start of the pandemic in 2020. ‘My first day as CEO was from behind a screen,’ he jokes with Spear’s.

Choukeir’s premiership focuses on projecting the bank’s image as one with deep European history (Hambros financed Scandinavian businesses while Kleinwort Benson, a bank with German origins, financed the Spanish government between 1939 to 1975), ‘with a modern, entrepreneurial mindset’. ‘In fact, we like to think of Hambros as a start-up with two hundred years of experience,’ he says, emphasising on the bank’s focus on helping its client ‘build sustainable legacies for generations to come’.