Saudi National Bank appointed Fawaz bin Abdullah Althumairi as deputy chief executive officer of the bank effective 3 September 2026, according to a statement issued by SNB Group. Althumairi moves into the role from the leadership of the bank's Treasury Group, the unit responsible for balance-sheet management, funding and market-facing activity at the Kingdom's largest lender by assets. The group said the appointment forms part of an effort to strengthen its leadership structure and develop its operating model in a way that supports business integration and improves performance efficiency. The bank did not disclose the reporting lines or the specific portfolio attached to the new position in its announcement.
SNB Group framed the appointment as coinciding with continued growth in its business and a widening scope of activity, and as part of work to deliver its strategic priorities, reinforce its capacity to keep growing and provide sustainable value to customers and shareholders. The creation of a deputy chief executive layer sits alongside the operating-model changes the group described in the same statement, indicating an intention to distribute senior executive responsibility more formally across the bank rather than to fill a single vacancy. Saudi National Bank, listed on Tadawul under the ticker SNB, was formed from the merger of National Commercial Bank and Samba Financial Group and functions as the Kingdom's flagship banking institution. The bank did not publish a figure for the size of the reorganisation or name other executives affected.
A TREASURY AND MARKETS CAREER
Althumairi's promotion follows an internal career that has run through the bank's markets, investment and transaction-banking businesses. Before taking charge of the Treasury Group, he served as head of trading, then head of strategic investments, and subsequently as head of cash management and global transaction banking, according to the bank's statement. That sequence places his experience at the intersection of proprietary balance-sheet activity, strategic stakes and the corporate flow businesses that generate fee income and deposits.
He holds a bachelor's degree in management information systems from King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals and has completed several executive leadership programmes at leading universities internationally. The profile is consistent with a preference among Gulf banks for elevating internally developed executives with treasury and markets backgrounds into group-level roles, at a point when funding costs, deposit competition and liquidity management have become central to bank performance across the region. Coverage of the appointment did not identify a predecessor in the deputy chief executive post.
LEADERSHIP DEPTH AT THE KINGDOM'S LARGEST LENDER
The appointment lands during a period of sustained expansion in Saudi banking activity, driven by corporate lending tied to the Kingdom's investment programme and by mortgage and retail credit demand. Banks of SNB's scale have responded by deepening executive benches and separating group-level strategy from day-to-day banking execution, a pattern the group's reference to developing its operating model appears to reflect. For a lender whose loan growth has consistently outpaced deposit formation across the Saudi system, placing a treasury specialist in the deputy chief executive seat aligns senior authority with the funding question that most directly constrains further balance-sheet growth.
Attention now turns to whether SNB Group discloses a fuller executive structure, including the division of responsibilities between the deputy chief executive and the group's other senior leaders, and to who succeeds Althumairi at the head of the Treasury Group. Neither detail was included in the announcement. The bank's next set of quarterly disclosures will be the first to reflect the revised leadership arrangement, and investors will look there for any accompanying change to strategic guidance or segment reporting.