Sean Nero

T&T's fi­nan­cial sys­tem is un­der im­mense scruti­ny from glob­al in­sti­tu­tions as are trans­ac­tions from this coun­try, says pres­i­dent of the Bankers As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T (BATT) Anya Schnoor.

"We know what hap­pened to Be­lize. A lot of banks–cor­re­spon­dent banks–pulled out of Be­lize. There is word that they are pulling out of Guyana. They have pulled out of a lot of the small­er is­lands. We can't pre­tend. We may be next. We are very con­cerned.

"If a lo­cal bank does not have a cor­re­spon­dent bank in the Unit­ed States, we can't is­sue cred­it cards any­more in the coun­try be­cause we would not be able to set­tle with Visa and Mas­ter­Card. We would not be able to do wire trans­fers, so we would lit­er­al­ly be cut out of the bank­ing sys­tem," she said

Schnoor said when coun­tries lose cor­re­spon­dent bank­ing re­la­tion­ships, a range of dai­ly trans­ac­tions are af­fect­ed.

She ex­plained: "They have to set­tle a bill in the US...they would not be able to send a wire to set­tle that bill be­cause we would not have a re­la­tion­ship with a cor­re­spon­dent bank in the States. We have to re­mem­ber we don't is­sue or print US dol­lars.

"Every US trans­ac­tion has to go through a US bank and it re­quires us to have a cor­re­spon­dent re­la­tion­ship. They are not go­ing to bank us if we are not in com­pli­ance. This is not some­thing that start­ed in the last year. I want to make that clear."

In mid-Au­gust, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert and US Am­bas­sador John L Estra­da signed an In­ter-Gov­ern­men­tal Agree­ment (IGA) aimed at im­prov­ing in­ter­na­tion­al tax com­pli­ance through mu­tu­al as­sis­tance in tax mat­ters

Schnoor not­ed frus­tra­tions ex­pressed by some cus­tomers when asked to pro­vide de­tailed per­son­al in­for­ma­tion and source of funds to open an ac­count, but said in­ter­na­tion­al re­quire­ments have to be met be­cause there is a lot of mon­ey in cir­cu­la­tion, much of which is kept out of the for­mal bank­ing sys­tem.

She said BATT has to "make sure that we en­able banks and help banks do the things that they have to do and that re­quires us en­forc­ing the laws on the books."

"While we have signed the IGA with the US, which marked the first phase of the process, the next step is for the gov­ern­ment of T&T to pass the en­abling leg­is­la­tion by the end of Sep­tem­ber. We haven't seen the draft of the en­abling leg­is­la­tion."