There has been yet an­oth­er re­duc­tion in the for­eign ex­change lim­it for cred­it card hold­ers at Re­pub­lic Bank.

In a no­tice yes­ter­day, the bank dis­closed that ef­fec­tive Au­gust 21, 2025, the max­i­mum US dol­lar spend­ing lim­it per billing cy­cle on Re­pub­lic Bank cred­it cards will be US$2,500 or the US$ cred­it lim­it of the ac­count, if less than US$2,500.

The bank said, “This change in­cludes all trans­ac­tions con­duct­ed out­side of Trinidad and To­ba­go as well as all in­ter­na­tion­al on­line trans­ac­tions, in­clud­ing trans­ac­tions where the cho­sen billing cur­ren­cy is TTD. These on­line trans­ac­tions will be in­clud­ed in the US$2,500 billing cy­cle lim­it.”

The bank said all TT-dol­lar trans­ac­tions will be un­af­fect­ed.

For some Re­pub­lic Bank cred­it card cus­tomers, who had a US$5,000 cred­it lim­it, the lat­est re­duc­tion in the US-dol­lar spend­ing lim­it rep­re­sents a 50 per cent cut.

It is the first time since 2023 that long-stand­ing Re­pub­lic Bank cred­it card hold­ers have seen the US lim­it re­duced. In Sep­tem­ber 2023, the bank re­duced the US-dol­lar spend­ing lim­it from US$10,000 to US$5000.

How­ev­er, it is not the first time this year, that an ad­just­ment has been made by the bank con­cern­ing cred­it card lim­its.

In May, the Bank con­firmed that new ap­pli­cants for cred­it cards will have a max­i­mum lim­it of US$500.

It al­so stat­ed that no new or ad­di­tion­al cards are to be sold to ex­ist­ing cus­tomers who cur­rent­ly have a cred­it card prod­uct with RBL.

Last De­cem­ber, the lim­it for new ap­pli­cants was set at US$2,000 where­as it had pre­vi­ous­ly been US$5,000.

At that time, the cus­tomers who held cred­it cards pri­or to De­cem­ber 2024 did not have their lim­it re­duced.

The bank said then that for­eign ex­change con­straints had prompt­ed the re­duc­tion.

The sit­u­a­tion has prompt­ed sev­er­al banks op­er­at­ing in Trinidad and To­ba­go to re­duce cred­it card lim­its, par­tic­u­lar­ly as sev­er­al busi­ness own­ers have turned to cred­it cards in a bid to cov­er the for­eign ex­change ex­pens­es.

In Feb­ru­ary 10, 2025, CIBC up­dat­ed its month­ly forex us­age lim­its from US$1,000 a month to US$500 for per­son­al ac­count Visa deb­it cards. And in De­cem­ber Sco­tia­bank cus­tomers with per­son­al cred­it cards, with the ex­cep­tion of the Aero Mas­ter­card Black, saw the max­i­mum lim­it re­duced to US$2,000.