National Commercial Bank → Samba Financial Group
Saudi Arabia's largest lender absorbed Samba, the bank Citibank founded in the kingdom in 1980, in a $15bn all-share merger that created Saudi National Bank, the biggest bank in the country, and was fully integrated nine months after it legally took effect.
Created Saudi National Bank with about $223bn of assets, the kingdom's largest lender.
- Value
- $15B
- Announced
- October 2020
- Completed
- April 2021
- Sector
- Banking
- Deal type
- merger
- Acquirer
- National Commercial Bank (Saudi Arabia)
- Target
- Samba Financial Group (Saudi Arabia)
Why it mattered
Consolidation was part of the Vision 2030 reform of Saudi finance: SABB's takeover of Alawwal Bank, completed in 2019, had been the sector's first merger in twenty years. National Commercial Bank, founded in 1953, and Samba, which began as the Saudi American Bank when Citibank's Saudi branches were put into a majority-Saudi company and which Citibank left entirely in 2004, both had government entities as significant shareholders, so this was a combination arranged rather than contested.
The banks signed a framework agreement on 25 June 2020 and a binding one on 11 October. Samba shareholders received 0.739 new NCB shares for each share, at the lower end of the 0.736–0.787 range set in June. That valued Samba at about SAR55.7bn, or $15bn — a 3.5% premium to its last price and about 24% above where it traded before the talks became public. NCB increased its share count by 49.3%, leaving its existing holders with 67.4% and Samba's with 32.6%. Samba's chairman, Ammar Alkhudairy, became chairman of the combined bank and NCB's chairman, Saeed Al-Ghamdi, its chief executive. Shareholders of both banks approved on 1 March 2021, the central bank, competition authority and market regulator cleared it, and on 1 April NCB renamed itself Saudi National Bank and Samba merged into it.
What it left behind
SNB started with SAR896bn ($239bn) of assets and about 30% of the Saudi market across all metrics. It had expected integration to take 18 months; the last phase, including the migration of customer accounts, was finished on 6 January 2022. Its first large move abroad went badly. In November 2022 it bought almost 9.9% of Credit Suisse for SAR5.5bn ($1.46bn); in March 2023 Alkhudairy answered "absolutely not" when asked whether it would invest more, Credit Suisse's shares fell 24% that day, and after UBS's rescue SNB was sitting on a loss of more than $1bn. Alkhudairy resigned and Al-Ghamdi became chairman. At home the scale held: by September 2025 total assets had reached SAR1.21 trillion and nine-month profit SAR18.63bn. When a state engineers a merger between its own banks, the usual obstacles of price and competition review fall away; what tests the new national champion is how it deploys its enlarged balance sheet afterwards.