Caribbean In­for­ma­tion and Cred­it Rat­ing Ser­vices Lim­it­ed (Cari­CRIS) has reaf­firmed its rat­ings on the debt is­sue (no­tion­al) of the size of US$25 mil­lion of NCB Cap­i­tal Mar­kets Lim­it­ed (NCBCML) of CariBBB- (For­eign Cur­ren­cy Rat­ing) and CariBBB (Lo­cal Cur­ren­cy Rat­ing) on its re­gion­al rat­ing scale and jmA+ on the Ja­maica na­tion­al scale. The re­gion­al rat­ings in­di­cate that the lev­el of cred­it­wor­thi­ness of this oblig­a­tion, ad­judged in re­la­tion to oth­er oblig­a­tions in the Caribbean is ad­e­quate, ac­cord­ing to Cari­CRIS.

The rat­ing agency said: "The rat­ings of NCBCML re­flect the com­pa­ny's ro­bust cap­i­tal ad­e­qua­cy lev­els, its favourable mar­ket po­si­tion be­ing the sec­ond largest se­cu­ri­ties deal­er in the Ja­maican mar­ket, and its ex­ten­sive ge­o­graph­ic cov­er­age. "The com­pa­ny lever­ages on its re­la­tion­ship with its par­ent, Na­tion­al Com­mer­cial Bank Ja­maica Lim­it­ed (NCBJ), reap­ing syn­er­gis­tic ben­e­fits that lead to the most favourable op­er­at­ing ef­fi­cien­cy ra­tio in the in­dus­try. Al­so sup­port­ing the rat­ings is the strong as­set port­fo­lio dom­i­nat­ed by Gov­ern­ment of Ja­maica (GOJ) se­cu­ri­ties. "In ad­di­tion, it has a favourable re­source pro­file which is strength­ened by an in­creas­ing fo­cus on re­tail clients. Fur­ther­more, NCBCML's fi­nan­cial per­for­mance im­proved in FY20111 de­spite op­er­at­ing in a chal­leng­ing en­vi­ron­ment. These strengths are tem­pered by the pre­vail­ing tight cred­it con­di­tions, in the in­ter­na­tion­al cap­i­tal mar­kets and lim­it­ed liq­uid­i­ty sup­port mech­a­nisms avail­able to the com­pa­ny