HSBC Bank Middle East (HBME, Arabic: إتش إس بي سي الشرق الأوسط), known from 1959 to 1999 as British Bank of the Middle East (BBME), is the largest and most widely represented international bank in the Middle East, fully owned by HSBC. It was founded in Tehran, Qajar Iran in 1889 and has successively been headquartered in Tehran (1889-1959), London (1959-1999), Jersey (1999-2016), and Dubai since 2016.
HBME is regulated by the Dubai Financial Services Authority, but remains locally regulated in each of the countries in which it operates by the country's Central Bank and its other regulators.
Overview
In 1959, HSBC purchased the London-headquartered British Bank of the Middle East, the former Imperial Bank of Persia that had been renamed in 1952 following expropriation from its historic operations in Iran.[1] By then, the BBME had offices in Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the Trucial States (later