MOHAMMED AL RAJHI

Mohammed Al Rajhi came from a family that understood money the old-fashioned way — by handling it. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Al Rajhi brothers worked as currency exchangers in Riyadh, a city that was just beginning to feel the first tremors of oil money.

In 1957, the brothers formalized their business into what would become Al Rajhi Bank. The timing was almost unfairly good.

Saudi Arabia's oil revenues started compounding through the 1960s and exploded in the 1970s. Millions of Saudi citizens needed banking services, and many of them refused to use conventional interest-bearing banks on religious grounds.

Al Rajhi Bank was already there, already Sharia-compliant, already trusted. The bank expanded steadily, opened branches across the kingdom, and eventually became a publicly traded institution on the Saudi Stock Exchange (Tadawul) in 2006.

Mohammed was a key part of the founding generation that set the culture and the principles that the bank still runs on.

Al Rajhi Bank is the headline asset. It is the world's largest Islamic bank by total assets, headquartered in Riyadh, with operations in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, and Malaysia.

In 2023 it reported net income of over 14 billion Saudi riyals — roughly $3.7 billion. The Al Rajhi family also holds interests in real estate, agriculture, and Saudi industrial businesses through various family holding entities.

The fortune has been passed across multiple generations, with dozens of family members now managing various parts of the business.

Mohammed Al Rajhi did not think like a portfolio manager. He thought like a builder.

The approach was to create institutions that communities depend on, then hold them for generations. No trading, no speculation, no borrowing to amplify returns.

Islamic finance forbids riba — interest-based lending — so the bank's financial model is built on profit-sharing, cost-plus financing, and asset-backed transactions. The strategy is the opposite of leveraged buyouts and high-frequency trading.

It is slow, steady, and extraordinarily durable.

The founding and growth of Al Rajhi Bank is the win. When the bank went public on the Tadawul in 2006, it was one of the largest IPOs in Saudi history.

The family's collective stake in the bank — built from a currency-exchange business with almost no starting capital — became worth tens of billions of dollars across multiple family branches. By any measure, converting a souk stall into the world's largest Islamic bank over fifty years is a result that very few family businesses anywhere in the world have matched.

Specific public admissions of mistakes are rare from the Al Rajhi founding generation — it was a different era of business culture, where patriarchs did not give TED talks about their failures. What is documented is that the early Al Rajhi banking model had some regulatory friction with Saudi authorities before full formal licensing, as it operated in a gray zone between currency exchange and banking for years.

Getting that formalized took time and negotiation. It was resolved, but it is a reminder that operating ahead of regulatory frameworks always carries risk.

His philosophy was anchored in Islamic economics. Money is a trust, not a commodity.

You make money through trade and productive work, not by charging others to use money. The mudarabah model — where the bank provides capital and the entrepreneur provides labor, sharing profits — is the foundation.

So is murabahah, where the bank buys an asset and sells it to the customer at a markup instead of charging interest. These are not just technicalities.

They represent a genuine philosophical view that finance should serve the real economy, not the other way around.

Mohammed Al Rajhi was one of four brothers who built the bank: Suleiman (the eldest and most internationally known), Mohammed, Saleh, and Abdullah. The family is now one of the largest in Saudi Arabia by any measure — dozens of descendants are involved in various business and philanthropic activities.

His brother Suleiman became particularly famous for pledging to donate the vast majority of his wealth to charitable causes, giving away billions over his lifetime.

Like most Saudi businessmen of his generation, Mohammed Al Rajhi's education was practical rather than formal. He learned commerce in the family currency exchange from a young age.

The souk was the classroom. Academic credentials mattered less than trust, relationships, and an understanding of how money moved in a rapidly transforming kingdom.

This was not unusual — many of the great Gulf business families of that era were built by people who never sat in a university lecture hall.

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