TCI Finance Minister comments on Bank Closures 

By Dana Malcolm 

Staff Writer  

#TurksandCaicos, April 6, 2023 – Without a significantly larger financial services sector to strengthen their negotiating power, there is precious little the Government can do to stop banks closing locations according to E Jay Saunders in a recent interview with Magnetic Media.

“The banks don’t come and present their plans to us and say will I be able to close this branch down,” he explained. “We don’t work with the banks on downsizing– we don’t get months and months or weeks and weeks of heads up where we can then sit down and discuss it with them,” he added.

That doesn’t mean they’re not concerned, the Government’s position on the closures was this: 

“It is troubling for me when banks close branches and every time it happens, we have an eye on them”

He said bank changes that would affect staffing usually warranted a few weeks of heads-up and for branch notices barely any at all, which left little room for compromise.

“If we get a reverse, it would almost have to be the Government taking a very strong position to get them to reverse but more often than not we are hearing about it when it’s a decision that has already been made.”

That was unlikely to change given the size of the country’s finance industry, on the global scale TCI is, if you will, a small fry.

“It comes down to the size of the financial services sector.  If we had a sector the size of Cayman or Bermuda, we’d have a lot more power with the banks because they would want to be in the jurisdiction and wouldn’t be treating it as one of their smaller markets,” he explained.

He also noted that these decisions were sometimes a regional policy, not just TCI. He said the banks had been in conversation with the Finance Ministry though and while they were moving towards digitization for efficiency’s sake, they were still committed to the Turks and Caicos.

CIBC FirstCaribbean, ScotiaBank, and RBC, all Canadian based, have locations in TCI.  Recent changes at CIBC however, gave rise again to concerns among residents with its closure of two branches – Grand Turk and Grace Bay – within the last three months.

“All three banks have assured us that they’re not pulling out of the Turks and Caicos, they are heavily invested, they want to grow.”

Saunders plans to grow the finance industry to around 25 million dollars a year in the upcoming years.