Bridgetown–With thou­sands wor­ry­ing about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of re­trench­ment, Re­pub­lic Bank (Bar­ba­dos) Lim­it­ed, an­nounced the in­tro­duc­tion of a Fi­nan­cial Care Unit to pro­vide fi­nan­cial ad­vice to cus­tomers, fac­ing chal­lenges an­tic­i­pat­ed by im­mi­nent lay­offs in the pub­lic sec­tor and any fur­ther con­trac­tion in the econ­o­my."The news that 3,000 Gov­ern­ment em­ploy­ees would be re­trenched in the not too dis­tant fu­ture is dis­turb­ing. As a fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tion, which would have ex­tend­ed cred­it fa­cil­i­ties to per­sons in the pub­lic sec­tor, we be­lieve the re­spon­si­ble thing to do, is to put some­thing in place to help them through what will cer­tain­ly be a dif­fi­cult pe­ri­od," said Car­los Brath­waite, se­nior man­ag­er, Re­tail Risk and Spe­cial Cred­it, dur­ing a press con­fer­ence at the bank's In­de­pen­dence Square head­quar­ters, Bridgetown, Bar­ba­dos.

Lo­cat­ed in the Broad Street Sales Cen­tre, the Re­pub­lic Bank (Bar­ba­dos) Lim­it­ed Fi­nan­cial Care Unit, will pro­vide prompt, rel­e­vant and sound fi­nan­cial ad­vice, to pub­lic sec­tor work­ers and any­one else in need of fi­nan­cial guid­ance in the face of ex­pect­ed de­vel­op­ments in the coun­try.Ac­cord­ing to Brath­waite, the Fi­nan­cial Care Unit will be staffed by a team with spe­cif­ic skills in cus­tomer care and debt man­age­ment. The bank's over­all ob­jec­tive in this ex­er­cise is to as­sist dis­placed work­ers fac­ing the chal­lenges of re­pay­ing their debts and any­one whose fi­nan­cial cir­cum­stances have be­come strained due to loss of in­come or heavy com­mit­ments."Whether a cus­tomer of Re­pub­lic Bank or not, our of­fi­cers will meet with vis­i­tors to the Fi­nan­cial Care Unit, dis­cuss ap­pro­pri­ate op­tions such as resched­ul­ing or con­sol­i­dat­ing ex­ist­ing debts over a longer re­pay­ment pe­ri­od to ac­com­mo­date re­duced in­come, the dis­pos­al of as­sets to cush­ion loss of in­come and gen­er­al­ly pro­vide fi­nan­cial coun­sel­ing for bet­ter man­age­ment of ex­pens­es," Brath­waite ex­plained.

The unit will func­tion by ap­point­ment dur­ing nor­mal bank­ing hours and will strive to en­ter­tain as many ap­point­ments in as short a time as pos­si­ble. There will be no charge for the ser­vice."On Jan­u­ary 22, we launched the 2014 Pow­er to Make A Dif­fer­ence cam­paign, our cor­po­rate so­cial re­spon­si­bil­i­ty pro­gramme, the tenets of which are equal­ly apro­pos in this sce­nario–the pow­er to care, the pow­er to help, the pow­er to learn and the pow­er to suc­ceed. With cus­tomer fo­cus as our pri­ma­ry core val­ue, we are, with the in­tro­duc­tion of the Fi­nan­cial Care Unit, al­so demon­strat­ing our pow­er to care and to help oth­ers suc­ceed in a most dif­fi­cult time in this coun­try," said Brath­waite. (CMC)