Palestine

There were times in the last year when Mahmoud Shawa didn’t know if he was running a bank or a healthcare system. Welcome to Bank of Palestine’s dangerous, but legacy-defining year.

Given the pandemic and tensions with Israel, the Palestinian economy did not generate any big deals such as IPOs or M&A in the last 12 to 18 months. In fact, the Palestine Capital Market Authority even suspended local stock trading for a time, starting in March 2020.

A good financial institution doing worthy work in a troubled territory, Bank of Palestine has performed admirably over the last year.

Bank of Palestine might be easy to overlook at first. Ensconced in a small territory (the West Bank) in an extremely troubled and uncertain part of the world, squeezed between Israel and Jordan, it is not a big lender by any measure.

The speed with which trade between Asia and the Middle East is growing is embodied and exemplified by Bank of Palestine.