Banco di Roma was established on April 15, 1907 as a result of an agreement between the government of Italy and the Ottman Sultan at the late period of the Turkish rule on Libya and before the Italian colonization of Libya. Its establishment was aimed at providing financial services for foreigners in the fields of trade, manufacturing and purchasing arable lands in Tripoli and Benghazi.
During the British Military Administration which controlled Cyrenaica, Tripoli, and Fezzan at the time, Barclays, the British bank opened its first branch in Tripoli on the 15th of April 1943, and the bank opened in Benghazi its first branch on the 15th of July the same year. The branch commenced it operations on a very small scale, including deposit accounts without interests, managing the account of clients and granting very few agricultural loans.br>
On the 13th of November 1969, the Act to change the names of commercial operational banks in the country to Arabic names was issued. So the name of the bank was changed from Banco di Roma to Umma Bank. And on the 22nd of December 1970 another Act was issued to nationalize all quotas of foreign banks operating in the country to become fully owned by Libya, so Barclays Bank was renamed Jumhouria Bank.
On the 10th of April 2008 the Central Bank of Libya issued its decision to merge the two banks of Umma and Jumhouria into one bank under the name "Jumhouria Bank" with a budget amounting to 20 billion LYD, thus the Bank became the second biggest Libyan bank after the Libyan Foreign Bank. The number of its employees after merger had reached to more than 5800 male and female employees, its branches 147 branches and agencies, and a market share up to 33 percent.
In 2013 the decision of the General Assembly of the Bank was issued to transform the Bank from a traditional commercial bank to an Islamic one on several phases, and as a result Fashloum Branch for Islamic Banking was the first Islamic branch in Libya.