Shareholders approved the merger of National Commercial Bank (NCB) and Samba Financial Group to create the largest lender in Saudi Arabia with total assets of $239 billion.

The merged bank will be named Saudi National Bank and operations will begin on April 1, according to a statement by the two lenders on Tuesday.

Shareholders of both banks voted in favor of the merger at an extraordinary general meeting on March 1 after receiving regulatory approvals from the Saudi Central Bank, General Authority for Competition, Capital Markets Authority (CMA) and Tadawul.

“The merger will create a pre-eminent financial institution with significant value creation potential for shareholders, customers and employees, structured to finance economic development, support Vision 2030 and facilitate trade and capital flows with the region and the rest of the world,” the two banks said.

In October, NCB and Samba agreed to merge to create the biggest banking entity in the kingdom, the Arab world’s largest economy.

The new bank will have a 30 per cent market share and “benefit from increased scale, sharing of best practices and unprecedented depth of employee talent.”

Ammar Alkhudairy will be the new chairman of Saudi National Bank, while Saeed Al Ghamdi will take over as managing director and group chief executive.

In preparation for the merger, NCB received approval from the CMA to increase its capital from $8 billion to $12 billion to issue new shares in NCB to Samba shareholders, with a share swap ratio of 0.739 NCB ordinary shares for each Samba ordinary share.

The bank will be headquartered in Riyadh.

The biggest shareholders in the new lender are the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, with a 37.2 percent stake, followed by the Public Pension Agency with 7.4 percent and the General Organization for Social Insurance with 5.8 per cent.