Chair­man of First­Caribbean In­ter­na­tion­al Bank Lim­it­ed David Ritch says 2015 was a year of re­cov­ery for the bank which achieved net in­come of US$98 mil­lion. He said this was "a sig­nif­i­cant im­prove­ment" over fis­cal 2014 when the bank suf­fered net loss of US$148 mil­lion.

In the bank's an­nu­al re­port which has been post­ed to the T&T Stock Ex­change, Ritch said First­Caribbean's re­struc­tur­ing pro­gramme, which was an­nounced in Oc­to­ber 2013 will end in the cur­rent fis­cal year. He said the bank is start­ing to see the re­sult of cor­rec­tive mea­sures put in place over the past two years, with con­tin­ued em­pha­sis on cor­po­rate gov­er­nance, cus­tomer en­gage­ment, cost con­tain­ment and sales and ser­vice ex­cel­lence. He said: "The bank con­duct­ed a strate­gic as­sess­ment of our op­er­a­tions re­gion-wide and con­clud­ed that some lev­els of ad­just­ments were re­quired in the way we cur­rent­ly con­duct our busi­ness to en­sure that First­Caribbean main­tains and builds on its strengths and op­por­tu­ni­ties in key mar­kets.

"In some ter­ri­to­ries this re­sult­ed in the clo­sure of branch­es and in oth­ers, the con­sol­i­da­tion of branch­es to make our op­er­a­tions more ef­fi­cient and po­si­tion us to dri­ve prof­itable growth. The an­nounce­ment of our ex­it from the Be­lize mar­ket fol­lowed this re­view, with an al­most si­mul­ta­ne­ous an­nounce­ment of the open­ing of a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of­fice in Aru­ba, and plans for full branch fa­cil­i­ties in fis­cal 2016."

Ritch said the bank's im­proved per­for­mance took place against a back drop of a slow and un­even eco­nom­ic in the Caribbean. "While the pace of growth in stay-over tourist ar­rivals gen­er­al­ly slowed dur­ing the first half of the year, lat­est da­ta sug­gests that more tourists vis­it­ed the Caribbean in 2015 com­pared to 2014. In some of the ju­ris­dic­tions in which we have a pres­ence stay-over num­bers for re­cent years have been en­cour­ag­ing," he said.

"Un­em­ploy­ment, while gen­er­al­ly low­er, re­mains el­e­vat­ed, and do­mes­tic de­mand slug­gish, as weak mort­gage growth and cuts to cap­i­tal ex­pen­di­ture in some mar­kets lim­it ex­pan­sion in con­struc­tion ac­tiv­i­ty. The bank­ing sec­tor lend­ing con­tin­ues to lag the eco­nom­ic re­cov­ery and re­mains vir­tu­al­ly flat, but bank loan qual­i­ty con­tin­ues to im­prove and cap­i­tal buffers re­main ad­e­quate rel­a­tive to reg­u­la­to­ry re­quire­ments."

He said with the ex­cep­tion of T&T where cred­it de­mand re­mains strongest, cen­tral banks across the re­gion have main­tained or in­creased ac­com­moda­tive mon­e­tary pol­i­cy stances to en­cour­age greater lend­ing and re­duce the lev­el and cost of high ex­cess liq­uid­i­ty.

Com­ment­ing on the re­cent de­par­ture of Rik Parkhill, who stepped down as First­Caribbean CEO in De­cem­ber, Ritch praised him for his ' ded­i­ca­tion to the qual­i­ty of lead­er­ship that was need­ed to re­turn this bank to fi­nan­cial health through a com­bi­na­tion of mea­sures that were at times dif­fi­cult for us all have borne fruit as ev­i­denced by our re­sults this fis­cal." He an­nounced that Sir Fred Gol­lop QC, one of the bank's longest serv­ing board mem­bers, has de­cid­ed not to stand for elec­tion as di­rec­tor this year and Parkhill has agreed to stand for elec­tion at the bank's an­nu­al meet­ing in March to fill the va­can­cy re­sult­ing from Sir Fred's re­tire­ment.