GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

Se­nior Re­porter

geisha.kow­lessar@guardian.co.tt

ANSA Mer­chant Bank Ltd (AM­BL) has re­port­ed a strong fi­nan­cial per­for­mance for the past fis­cal year, dri­ven by growth in its loan port­fo­lio and non-in­ter­est in­come, ac­cord­ing to man­ag­ing di­rec­tor Stephen Grell.

The bank al­so ex­pects pos­i­tive mo­men­tum to con­tin­ue in­to 2026, de­spite on­go­ing sec­tor chal­lenges.

In an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia fol­low­ing AM­BL’s an­nu­al meet­ing held at the Hy­att Re­gency yes­ter­day, Grell not­ed that both the bank­ing seg­ment and the wider group de­liv­ered sol­id year-on-year growth.

“We had a strong per­for­mance in the bank­ing sec­tor and the group year-on-year with growth both in our loan port­fo­lio and non-in­ter­est­ing in­come, both gen­er­at­ing good re­turns.

“At the group side, we post­ed $246 mil­lion af­ter-tax prof­its, which is a sig­nif­i­cant 46 per cent growth year-on-year, and we con­tin­ue to ex­pect in­to 2026 an­oth­er strong show­ing,” he said.

Look­ing ahead, ANSA Mer­chant Bank is plac­ing strong em­pha­sis on tar­get­ed mar­ket ex­pan­sion. While main­tain­ing its do­mes­tic pres­ence, the in­sti­tu­tion is al­so seek­ing to deep­en its re­gion­al foot­print, par­tic­u­lar­ly in Bar­ba­dos, where it al­ready op­er­ates.

“We are look­ing at how we ex­pand, not on­ly in Trinidad, we have an en­ti­ty in Bar­ba­dos, so we want to deep­en our re­la­tion­ships in Bar­ba­dos as well, and we are fo­cussing a lot on de­liv­er­ing tech­nol­o­gy so­lu­tions to en­sure we can ef­fi­cient­ly de­liv­er our ser­vices to those seg­ments,” Grell ex­plained.

De­spite the pos­i­tive out­look, the sec­tor con­tin­ues to face no­table chal­lenges as Grell point­ed to per­sis­tent for­eign ex­change con­straints as a ma­jor fac­tor lim­it­ing growth across the in­dus­try.

“It’s no se­cret, right, the for­eign ex­change is­sue is con­tin­u­ing to stymie growth. We’re al­so see­ing re­duced liq­uid­i­ty in the sec­tor, which is im­pact­ing cred­it ex­pan­sion, and econ­o­my-wise, Trinidad is on the rise, and we hope that con­tin­ues,” Grell said.

When asked about the broad­er eco­nom­ic out­look and pol­i­cy di­rec­tion, Grell em­pha­sised the im­por­tance of ef­fi­cien­cy and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty.

He re­frained from of­fer­ing spe­cif­ic rec­om­men­da­tions to pol­i­cy­mak­ers but sug­gest­ed that im­prove­ments in these ar­eas would ben­e­fit all sec­tors.

Mean­while, Musa Ibrahim, sec­tor head for in­sur­ance and man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of Tatil and Tatil Life ex­plained the sec­tor has re­port­ed a sig­nif­i­cant surge in the com­pa­ny’s fi­nan­cial per­for­mance, high­light­ing a marked im­prove­ment in prof­itabil­i­ty be­tween 2024 and 2025.

“Over­all, we’ve seen sig­nif­i­cant im­prove­ment in prof­itabil­i­ty. Be­tween 2024 and 2025, we’ve seen a 47 per cent in­crease.

“We’ve hit a $208 mil­lion prof­itabil­i­ty mark, which is sig­nif­i­cant and when we look at the rev­enue lev­els, it is like 20 plus per­cent on rev­enue,” he ex­plained.

He added that the biggest area that drove that im­prove­ment would have been the com­pa­ny’s un­der­writ­ing dis­ci­pline and fo­cussing on prop­er risk se­lec­tion.