T&T’s largest bank, Re­pub­lic Bank Ltd (RBL), last night ad­vised its cus­tomers that it was cut­ting in half the max­i­mum US dol­lar spend­ing lim­it per billing cy­cle on their Re­pub­lic Bank cred­it cards.

In an email no­tice to its cus­tomers, which was re­pro­duced on its web­site, RBL ad­vised that the US-dol­lar cred­it card lim­it would be re­duced from US$10,000 to US$5,000 ef­fec­tive Sep­tem­ber 21, 2023. The rea­son for the re­duc­tion in the US-dol­lar cred­it card lim­it, which is un­til fur­ther no­tice, was not pro­vid­ed in last night’s com­mu­ni­ca­tions.

In its emailed no­tice, RBL said: “This change in­cludes all trans­ac­tions con­duct­ed out­side of T&T as well as all in­ter­na­tion­al on­line trans­ac­tions, in­clud­ing trans­ac­tions where the cho­sen billing cur­ren­cy is TT dol­lar.

“These on­line trans­ac­tions will be in­clud­ed in your US$5,000 billing cy­cle lim­it. All lo­cal TT-dol­lar trans­ac­tions con­duct­ed on­line or at mer­chants re­main un­af­fect­ed.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, RBL said the lim­it on its pre-paid VTM card would be ad­just­ed down­wards ef­fec­tive Oc­to­ber 1, 2023. The max­i­mum VTM card bal­ance will be re­duced from US$5,000 to US$3,000 while on­line VTM loads would be re­duced from US$1,000 to US$500.

Last night, the de­ci­sion by Re­pub­lic to lim­it the amount of mon­ey that can be spent on for­eign goods and ser­vices was bit­ter­ly crit­i­cised on What­sApp groups.

On Ju­ly 21, RBL in­creased the dai­ly trans­ac­tion lim­it for point-of-sale and e-com­merce trans­ac­tions from $10,000 to $50,000.

The bank said that that meant that trans­ac­tions done at point-of-sale ter­mi­nals and via e-com­merce, when added to­geth­er can be as high as $50,000.

“For ex­am­ple, if a point-of-sale trans­ac­tion is $10,000, then an e-com­merce trans­ac­tion can be as high as $40,000,” the bank said in a no­tice.

For the nine months end­ed June 30, 2023, Re­pub­lic Fi­nan­cial Hold­ings Ltd (RFHL), which is the par­ent com­pa­ny of Re­pub­lic Bank Ltd, record­ed prof­it at­trib­ut­able to its share­hold­ers of $1.26 bil­lion, which was 10.2 per cent more than it earned for the same pe­ri­od in the pre­vi­ous fi­nan­cial year.

RFHL op­er­ates through­out the re­gion from the Cay­man Is­lands in the north to Suri­name in the south and in Ghana.

The bank hold­ing com­pa­ny’s as­sets to­talled $114.4 bil­lion as at June 30, 2023.