Ja­son Julien has been of­fi­cial­ly ap­point­ed group chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of First Cit­i­zens Group Fi­nan­cial Hold­ings ef­fec­tive from Oc­to­ber 22, 2025, “con­sis­tent with the pub­lished an­nounce­ments made on April 4, 2025 and Au­gust 27, 2025.

He suc­ceed­ed Karen Dar­basie who re­tired on Oc­to­ber 21.

This an­nounce­ment was con­firmed in a le­gal no­tice post­ed on the T&T Stock Ex­change on Tues­day.

In a sep­a­rate le­gal no­tice, the First Cit­i­zens Group stat­ed, “In fur­ther­ance of the Group’s le­gal no­tice dat­ed Au­gust 27, 2025 we here­by ad­vise that Ms Karen Dar­basie has re­tired as group chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer with ef­fect from Oc­to­ber 21, 2025.”

In the an­nounce­ment of Julien’s ap­point­ment, the bank stat­ed that he pos­sess­es an MBA (Dis­tinc­tion) from the Ed­in­burgh Busi­ness School, Heri­ot-Watt Uni­ver­si­ty and a BSc Man­age­ment Stud­ies (Ho­n­ours) from The Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies.

It al­so added that he is a Char­tered Fi­nan­cial An­a­lyst with the CFA In­sti­tute who al­so pos­sess­es a Cer­tifi­cate of Fi­nan­cial Ad­vi­sors with the In­sti­tute of Busi­ness and Fi­nance and has over 25 years of bank­ing and fi­nance ex­pe­ri­ence in lead­ing lo­cal and re­gion­al fi­nan­cial ser­vice en­ti­ties, along with var­ied board ap­point­ments.

First Cit­i­zens fur­ther ad­vised that Sana Rag­bir, gen­er­al man­ag­er, re­tail and com­mer­cial bank­ing, con­tin­ues to act as group deputy chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer, busi­ness gen­er­a­tion, un­til fur­ther no­tice.

Dar­basie was the first woman to hold the po­si­tion of group chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of First Cit­i­zens. She was ap­point­ed in that po­si­tion in April 2015, suc­ceed­ing Lar­ry Nath.

On April 4, 2025, First Cit­i­zens is­sued a ma­te­r­i­al change no­tice an­nounc­ing that the board of the com­pa­ny had tak­en the de­ci­sion on March 28, 2025, to ap­point Julien as the new group CEO to re­place Dar­basie up­on her re­tire­ment.

For­mer chair­man of the bank, An­tho­ny Smart, in an all-staff mem­o­ran­dum had stat­ed, “Our group CEO Karen Dar­basie, has pro­ceed­ed on ap­proved va­ca­tion leave for the pe­ri­od Au­gust 21, 2025, and will re­tire ef­fec­tive Oc­to­ber 21, 2025.”

The memo, in which Smart ad­dressed the over 1,400 em­ploy­ees of the bank on be­half of its board, al­so re­fut­ed a news­pa­per re­port that Dar­basie had ten­dered her res­ig­na­tion as group CEO “in a sud­den and un­ex­plained move” and that her res­ig­na­tion had been sub­mit­ted to Cor­po­ra­tion Sole, Min­is­ter of Fi­nance Dav­en­dranath Tan­coo, on Au­gust 20.