ShoumanCo
The first generation is Abdul Hameed Shouman, who established Arab Bank in Jerusalem in 1930.
The second generation, Abdul Majeed Shoman, succeeded his father as chairman of Arab Bank in 1974 and held the post for three decades — what The Guardian called the largest privately owned financial house in the Middle East.
On the paternal grandmother's side, the family also descends from Ahmad Hilmi Pasha (Abd al-Baqi) — Albanian by origin, Palestinian by identity, a banker and statesman who served as prime minister of the All-Palestine Government formed in Gaza in 1948. He continued to attend Arab League meetings in Cairo until his death.
Abdul Hameed Shoman was born in Beit Hanina, the son of a stonemason. He left for the United States in 1911, where the textile business he built gave him both the means and the temperament he would carry back to begin again at home.
In 1930, he established Arab Bank in Jerusalem. Across the decades that followed, it grew into one of the Arab world's most enduring financial institutions — built, above all, on the reliability of his name.
His life, character, and method are recorded in The Indomitable Arab — the published biography that remains the closest study of the man whose conviction the house still carries.
Hamza Shouman is the founder and principal of the family office — the fourth generation of the line.
ShoumanCo is a private family office, organised around three convictions:
- Elevate what is essential.
- Preserve what matters.
- Build for permanence.
Its headquarters, Al Grotto, is a private family estate in the countryside, overlooking the Dead Sea and Jerusalem.
Initiatives
Finance, treasury, and wealth — expenditure forecasting, capital strategy, liquidity, and bookkeeping held in real-time view.
The house's intrapreneurial engine — innovation, new business development, product, and commercialization research.
Marketing, advertising, branding, and sales — how the house presents its work to the world.
Preservation — archival and filing systems, data-management auditing, and the disciplined reinterpretation of what we keep.
The news desk — gathering and verifying what the house needs to know.
Public relations — the house's voice in conversation with the world.
The research nucleus — an in-house academic team producing the insight, frameworks, and data architecture behind every decision.
Business intelligence — mapping world markets and pressure-testing prototypes for size, profitability, and feasibility.
Performance management — output optimization and quality across the house.
People — recruitment, training, and the management of those who carry out the work.
Non-human resources — the tools and third-party services the house runs on.
Legal affairs — the house's standing in law.
Public affairs — the house's relationship with the wider polity.
Operations management — the day-to-day machinery that keeps everything moving.
Impact
What we leave behind matters more than what we accumulate.
A family is a centuries-long entity, and its acts should be priced accordingly. We invest where compounding is real — in institutions, in learning, in places — and resist being measured by the calendar.
95 yrs since 1930 · 4 generations · 14 divisions · ∞ horizon
We back education without expectation of return — the long-form kind, in fields that take a lifetime to ripen. The house has supported scholars for nearly a century, and intends to do so for at least another.
We preserve and commission work that records who we are — language, craft, and the everyday culture of the Levant. Memory is an asset class, and we treat it as one.
We are stewards before we are owners. Every initiative is run on the assumption that someone after us will inherit it, and should find it in better condition than we did.