The Cen­tral Bank of Trinidad and To­ba­go held a stake­hold­er meet­ing with the Bankers’ As­so­ci­a­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go (BATT) on Mon­day led by Gov­er­nor Lar­ry Howai. The ses­sion marked part of a se­ries of en­gage­ments fol­low­ing Gov­er­nor Howai’s re­cent ap­point­ment.

Howai un­der­scored the im­por­tance of con­tin­ued col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween the Cen­tral Bank and BATT in ad­dress­ing fi­nan­cial sec­tor mat­ters. He re­it­er­at­ed the Bank’s com­mit­ment to part­ner­ing with the bank­ing in­dus­try to de­vel­op so­lu­tions in the in­ter­est of na­tion­al fi­nan­cial sta­bil­i­ty.

Dis­cus­sions ad­dressed the state of the econ­o­my, fi­nan­cial sys­tem liq­uid­i­ty, for­eign ex­change sup­ply and de­mand, and up­dates on Know Your Cus­tomer (KYC) re­quire­ments. Gov­er­nor Howai iden­ti­fied res­o­lu­tion of for­eign ex­change im­bal­ances as a key fo­cus, stat­ing that equi­lib­ri­um be­tween de­mand and sup­ply re­mains a long-term ob­jec­tive. The banks pre­sent­ed rec­om­men­da­tions to im­prove ac­cess for con­sumers, which the Gov­er­nor com­mit­ted to re­view­ing.

The banks al­so in­quired about the im­ple­men­ta­tion of the Uni­fied Pay­ments In­ter­face (UPI) and sig­nalled sup­port for its progress. The meet­ing in­clud­ed up­dates on reg­u­la­to­ry mat­ters af­fect­ing the fi­nan­cial sec­tor.

Gov­er­nor Howai called for flex­i­bil­i­ty and cre­ativ­i­ty from the sec­tor in find­ing ef­fec­tive ap­proach­es to on­go­ing chal­lenges, pro­vid­ed there are no ad­verse ef­fects on the wider econ­o­my. He ex­pressed con­fi­dence in the abil­i­ty of reg­u­lar di­a­logue to yield re­sults and af­firmed that the Cen­tral Bank would main­tain close col­lab­o­ra­tion with BATT to sup­port a sta­ble and ef­fi­cient fi­nan­cial sys­tem.

Gov­er­nor Howai chaired the meet­ing with the Cen­tral Bank’s Se­nior Man­age­ment Team. BATT rep­re­sen­ta­tives in at­ten­dance in­clud­ed Vice-Pres­i­dent of BATT, Shawn Moses of JMMB Bank; Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer of Re­pub­lic Bank, Nigel Bap­tiste; Man­ag­ing Di­rec­tor of First Cit­i­zens Bank, Karen Dar­basie; Group Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer of RBC Roy­al Bank, Marc Jar­dine; Man­ag­ing Di­rec­tor of Citibank, Mitchell De Sil­va; Man­ag­ing Di­rec­tor of CIBC Caribbean Bank, Ma­hadeo Se­barath; Man­ag­ing Di­rec­tor of ANSA Bank, Savon Per­sad; Man­ag­ing Di­rec­tor of ANSA Mer­chant Bank, Stephen Grell; and Re­gion­al Di­rec­tor of Sco­tia­bank, Ran­dal Cezair.