Mouhammed Choukeir

Spear’s Review

SG 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 has been focused 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 over several decades), ‘with a modern, entrepreneurial mindset’. 

‘In fact, we like to think of Hambros as a start-up with 200 years of experience,’ he says, emphasising the bank’s focus on helping its clients ‘build sustainable legacies for generations to come’.