Raphael John-Lall

T&T is well po­si­tioned to be the in­ter­na­tion­al fi­nan­cial cen­tre of the re­gion, Varun Ma­haraj, chair­man of the T&T In­ter­na­tion­al Fi­nan­cial Cen­tre (IFC), said yes­ter­day."Un­like many of the com­pet­ing des­ti­na­tions, T&T, with a Stan­dard and Poor's rat­ing of A, is a vi­brant and sta­ble econ­o­my with world class in­fra­struc­ture and the avail­abil­i­ty of trained, Eng­lish speak­ing fi­nan­cial ser­vices and ac­count­ing per­son­nel," he said.

"We are lo­cat­ed with­in the same time zone as sev­er­al fi­nan­cial cen­tres such as New York and Toron­to. We boast of well de­vel­oped tele­coms in­fra­struc­ture. These fac­tors make T&T ide­al for back and mid­dle of­fices to sup­port fi­nan­cial ser­vice."Ma­haraj , who was speak­ing at the launch of a Bank­ing Process Out­sourc­ing (BPO) Pi­lot Train­ing Pro­gramme at the School of Ac­count­ing and Man­age­ment, St Au­gus­tine, said op­por­tu­ni­ties for the fi­nan­cial sec­tor con­tin­ue to grow.

"T&T is the on­ly coun­try in the West­ern Hemi­sphere with a niched, sec­tor spe­cif­ic val­ue propo­si­tion. This is giv­en the skill sets of our hu­man cap­i­tal and as well as the pop­u­la­tion size," he said.Ma­haraj said the IFC's role is fo­cused on the fa­cil­i­ta­tion of for­eign in­vest­ment in the bank­ing, fi­nan­cial ser­vices and in­sur­ance sec­tor.

"It is our role to de­vel­op sec­tor spe­cif­ic in­cen­tives and en­gage the Gov­ern­ment sup­port to trans­form T&T in­to ready-fi­nan­cial ser­vices hub. The T&T IFC is com­mit­ted to de­vel­op­ing T&T as a near off­shore fi­nan­cial ser­vices des­ti­na­tion through its end-to-end in­vest­ment fa­cil­i­ta­tion and sup­port ser­vices," he said.