CIBC Caribbean yes­ter­day an­nounced the ap­point­ment of vet­er­an banker, Ma­hadeo Se­barath as the new head of coun­try for its T&T busi­ness.

In mak­ing the an­nounce­ment, the bank’s chief coun­try man­age­ment of­fi­cer, Don­na Welling­ton, said Se­barath’s ap­point­ment was the cul­mi­na­tion of a dili­gent re­cruit­ment process which com­menced at the start of the year when the re­gion­al bank an­nounced changes to its coun­try man­age­ment struc­ture with the ap­point­ment of new lead­er­ship in a num­ber of ter­ri­to­ries in its 10-mem­ber foot­print.

“I am pleased to an­nounce the ap­point­ment of Ma­hadeo Se­barath as coun­try head for CIBC Trinidad & To­ba­go. He has over 25 years of lead­er­ship ex­pe­ri­ence and ex­per­tise at lo­cal, re­gion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al lev­el in the ar­eas of Bank­ing, Cor­po­rate Fi­nance, Busi­ness De­vel­op­ment, Strate­gic Plan­ning and Busi­ness Trans­for­ma­tion,” Welling­ton said in a news re­lease.

She not­ed that the ap­point­ment was sub­ject to reg­u­la­to­ry ap­proval.

CIBC Caribbean de­scribed Ma­hadeo as a sea­soned in­ter­na­tion­al bank­ing leader with sig­nif­i­cant knowl­edge in man­ag­ing busi­ness trans­for­ma­tion, dig­i­tal end-to-end on­board­ing so­lu­tions, ex­per­tise in de­sign think­ing, strat­e­gy for­mu­la­tion and de­vel­op­ment of new busi­ness mod­els.

He was in­te­gral to the con­cep­tu­al­i­sa­tion and cre­ation of the first shared ser­vices fi­nan­cial hub in Trinidad & To­ba­go. In ad­di­tion, he served as the man­ag­ing di­rec­tor for the largest bank in the Dutch Caribbean. His most re­cent as­sign­ment was vice pres­i­dent and chief op­er­at­ing of­fi­cer for bank­ing op­er­a­tions across Caribbean, Cen­tral Amer­i­ca and Uruguay.

Ma­hadeo is a qual­i­fied Ac­coun­tant (FC­CA), Cer­ti­fied In­ter­nal Au­di­tor (CIA) and holds a cer­tifi­cate from Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty in Dis­rup­tive In­no­va­tion. He al­so served on sev­er­al boards in Trinidad, Bar­ba­dos and the Dutch Caribbean.

Welling­ton de­scribed Ma­hadeo as “a pas­sion­ate, re­silient and col­lab­o­ra­tive leader whom we are hap­py to have on our team”.

On Jan­u­ary 29, 2025, CIBC Caribbean CEO Mark St Hill, an­nounced a change to its coun­try man­age­ment, that will place greater em­pha­sis on re­la­tion­ships with key stake­hold­er groups, in­clud­ing its em­ploy­ees, clients and the com­mu­ni­ty.

St Hill said, “This change to the or­gan­i­sa­tion’s struc­ture will mean that our oth­er cur­rent man­ag­ing di­rec­tors with re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for the bank’s op­er­at­ing com­pa­nies will tran­si­tion to dif­fer­ent types of roles in the or­gan­i­sa­tion. CIBC Caribbean’s man­ag­ing di­rec­tors in The Cay­man Is­lands and Ja­maica, Mark McIn­tyre and Nigel Hol­ness will be ap­point­ed the Chair­men of the Cay­man and Ja­maica busi­ness­es re­spec­tive­ly, while tak­ing ear­ly re­tire­ment from their day-to-day du­ties...

“...Our man­ag­ing di­rec­tor in Trinidad, An­tho­ny Seer­aj, will re­main with the bank un­til the end of fis­cal. Dur­ing this time his re­mit will be to help us se­cure a new head of coun­try for Trinidad, while as­sist­ing in a num­ber of busi­ness de­vel­op­ment ac­tiv­i­ties in Trinidad, af­ter which he too will take re­tire­ment.”

CIBC Caribbean, which is ma­jor­i­ty-owned by a Toron­to, Cana­da-based CIBC, is lo­cat­ed in ten coun­tries around the Caribbean, pro­vid­ing bank­ing ser­vices through ap­prox­i­mate­ly 2,700 em­ploy­ees in 41 branch­es and of­fices.

It is one of the largest re­gion­al­ly list­ed fi­nan­cial ser­vices in­sti­tu­tions in the Eng­lish-speak­ing Caribbean, with US$13 bil­lion in as­sets and mar­ket cap­i­tal­i­sa­tion of US$1.7 bil­lion.