Sean Nero

Re­pub­lic Bank Ltd is re­view­ing the cost of its ser­vices to in­di­vid­ual and busi­ness cus­tomers but has no plans to in­crease fees, says man­ag­ing di­rec­tor Nigel Bap­tiste.

"We are con­stant­ly re­view­ing our ser­vice charges, we are con­stant­ly re­view­ing how we do busi­ness," he told the T&T Guardian.

"The same ex­pec­ta­tions I have from the rest of the econ­o­my in terms of how you could make your­self more ef­fi­cient, how you could do more val­ue added ser­vice to your cus­tomers, to your em­ploy­ees, we are do­ing that in­ter­nal­ly as well. At this point in time, we don't have any plans to in­crease ser­vice fees."

Bap­tiste said RBL was in­ter­est­ed in part­ner­ing with small busi­ness­es to help them suc­cess­ful­ly nav­i­gate through the cur­rent eco­nom­ic down­turn.

"All we ask of them in re­turn is open and trans­par­ent com­mu­ni­ca­tion. We are go­ing to try and reach out to clients small, per­son­al, large in the sec­tors that we think would be the most chal­lenged sec­tors in the econ­o­my," he said.

So you could be in the en­er­gy sec­tor...ser­vices...they might be prime can­di­dates for be­ing un­der a lit­tle bit of pres­sure right now. We are go­ing to try to reach out to them, but they need to reach out to us. Don't wait un­til a chal­lenge comes and you re­alise you can­not pay. Come to the bank to let us work with you to try and de­vel­op a so­lu­tion that works in your best in­ter­est."

Bap­tiste added: "Our fu­ture de­pends on their fu­ture. There is no ben­e­fit to me in clos­ing down any busi­ness, so there­fore, we need to be able to work with the client, but the client has to be will­ing to work with us as well."

He said as an in­sti­ti­tion that has been around for 179 years, RBL has been through crises be­fore.

"We've made tough de­ci­sions with some busi­ness­es and we have al­so made great de­ci­sions with oth­ers where we part­nered with them and we made it work. The dif­fer­ence in the two was the at­ti­tudes of the busi­ness­es. Once we be­lieve that we are work­ing with clients who want to work with us and who we can trust, then any­thing is pos­si­ble in as­sist­ing those busi­ness­es," he said.