“We’re ex­cit­ed about what this will mean for the Ja­maican peo­ple, the op­por­tu­ni­ties that it will open up, and what new vis­tas await.”

This was the com­ment made by ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor of the T&T Unit Trust Cor­po­ra­tion Nigel Ed­wards on Mon­day night as GK Cap­i­tal Man­age­ment, the in­vest­ment and ad­vi­so­ry arm of GraceKennedy Ltd, and the UTC of­fi­cial­ly launched their new Col­lec­tive In­vest­ment Scheme—GK Mu­tu­al Funds at the AC Ho­tel in Kingston, Ja­maica.

GK Cap­i­tal Man­age­ment un­veiled the GK US Dol­lar In­come Fund, the GK Ja­maican-dol­lar Mon­ey Mar­ket Fund, and the GK Ja­maican Dol­lar Growth & In­come Fund—which will of­fer Ja­maican in­vestors “prod­ucts fo­cused on con­sis­ten­cy and sta­bil­i­ty, with the goal of sus­tain­able wealth cre­ation.”

“With this part­ner­ship we are build­ing a fu­ture and a lega­cy that will be­long to all of us, and of which we can all be proud,” Ed­wards said.

GK Group CEO, Don We­h­by com­ment­ed, “GK Mu­tu­al Funds boasts a com­bined 141 years of ex­pe­ri­ence and com­mit­ment to of­fer­ing in­no­v­a­tive so­lu­tions which add val­ue at every lev­el of so­ci­ety, (com­bin­ing) GK’s 100-year lega­cy of ser­vice to the peo­ple of Ja­maica and the com­mu­ni­ties we serve around the world with UTC’s 40 years of ex­per­tise in the Col­lec­tive In­vest­ment Schemes (CIS) mar­ket, man­ag­ing the largest unit trust port­fo­lio in the East­ern Caribbean. I am hap­py to wit­ness our or­gan­i­sa­tions com­ing to­geth­er in the in­ter­est of Ja­maican in­vestors as we fur­ther ad­vance our fi­nan­cial in­clu­sion strat­e­gy.”

UTC’s chair­man Jo-Anne Julien drew a com­par­i­son be­tween her or­gan­i­sa­tion’s found­ing pur­pose and their new ven­ture with GK, “Just as the UTC was es­tab­lished 40 years ago in T&T to cre­ate op­por­tu­ni­ties for col­lec­tive in­vest­ment that were ac­ces­si­ble to the every­day cit­i­zen, the aim of this ini­tia­tive is to bring sim­i­lar op­por­tu­ni­ties for par­tic­i­pa­tion in the in­vest­ment are­na to every Ja­maican house­hold.”

In a sym­bol­ic show­ing of the strength of their part­ner­ship and com­mon in­ter­est in serv­ing a new seg­ment of the Ja­maican fi­nan­cial ser­vice mar­ket, Ed­wards and Deputy CEO of the GK Fi­nan­cial Group, Steven Whit­ting­ham un­veiled the new mu­tu­al funds prod­ucts to­geth­er.

The GK Mu­tu­al Funds launch fol­lows the sign­ing of a joint ven­ture agree­ment be­tween GK and UTC in May 2022, mak­ing GK Cap­i­tal the ex­clu­sive sales agent for all GK/UTC mu­tu­al funds/unit trusts in Ja­maica.