Dressed in his starched white shirt and con­ser­v­a­tive banker's tie, Suresh Sookoo, the CEO of RBC Caribbean, seems com­fort­able and re­laxed in his cor­ner of­fice, with its pic­turesque ceil­ing to floor view of Queen's Roy­al Col­lege and the hills of St Ann's.

But even the calm, seem­ing­ly mild-man­nered bank­ing ex­ec­u­tive, must have got per­turbed by the thumbs-down re­views by some Trin­bag­o­ni­ans of RBC ser­vice changes as well as the neg­a­tive in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the sale in Jan­u­ary of RBC Ja­maica to Sagi­cor for US$84 mil­lion.

The sale of the RBC fran­chise in Ja­maica, the Eng­lish-speak­ing Caribbean's largest mar­ket, even led to spec­u­la­tion that a glob­al bank based in Lon­don was plan­ning to buy RBC Caribbean.

On that is­sue, Sookoo is un­equiv­o­cal: "We are not in dis­cus­sion with any oth­er bank in the Caribbean about sell­ing any­thing."

But he ad­mits that the bank is see­ing tough times in East­ern Caribbean coun­tries, which are tak­ing a long time to turn­around, and have very lit­tle lim­it­ed fis­cal flex­i­bil­i­ty.

The bank is plan­ning some re­struc­tur­ing up the is­lands, but part of that is due to the fact that the re­brand­ing af­ter the ac­qui­si­tion was nev­er done in some is­lands.