GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

geisha.kow­lessar@guardian.co.tt

Ef­fec­tive March 23, Re­pub­lic Bank Ltd will re­duce its US dol­lar spend­ing lim­it per billing cy­cle on all Re­pub­lic Bank cred­it cards.

The bank an­nounced the change will see a re­duc­tion in its cus­tomers spend­ing lim­it on cred­it cards from US$12,000 to US$10,000.

In a re­lease, the bank said it not­ed the im­pact the change may have on clients’ day-to-day op­er­a­tions, but said this was nec­es­sary to man­age its forex port­fo­lio.

The change will ap­ply to all trans­ac­tions con­duct­ed out­side of T&T and in­ter­na­tion­al on­line trans­ac­tions where the cho­sen billing cur­ren­cy is TTD.

These on­line trans­ac­tions will be in­clud­ed in the month­ly US$10,000 billing cy­cle, RBL said.

Lo­cal TTD trans­ac­tions con­duct­ed on­line or at mer­chants re­main un­af­fect­ed.

Clients should con­tact the Bank’s Cred­it Card Con­tact Cen­tre at 627-3348 or vis­it its web­site www.re­pub­lictt.com for fur­ther in­for­ma­tion.

The Cen­tral Bank had not­ed that the coun­try’s net for­eign re­serves were US$6.86 bil­lion at the end of Jan­u­ary.

Mean­while, lo­cal busi­ness­es con­tin­ue to com­plain that the avail­abil­i­ty of for­eign ex­change to pay for im­port­ed goods has ap­proached cri­sis pro­por­tions.

A re­cent sur­vey con­duct­ed by the T&T Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce and the T&T Coali­tion of Ser­vices In­dus­tries (TTC­SI) in col­lab­o­ra­tion with oth­er key stake­hold­ers found that the lack of for­eign ex­change has been a daunt­ing chal­lenge.

Two hun­dred and four firms across nine busi­ness or­gan­i­sa­tions par­tic­i­pat­ed in the sur­vey and the ma­jor­i­ty of firms, ap­prox­i­mate­ly 83 per cent (170 firms) were af­fect­ed by the in­abil­i­ty to source forex to pur­chase raw ma­te­r­i­al and some fin­ished prod­ucts from ex­ter­nal sources.

The sur­vey not­ed that this re­sult­ed in firms fac­ing dras­tic neg­a­tive im­pact on sales, in­abil­i­ty to main­tain sup­ply chains which re­sult­ed in de­lays in re­stock­ing and meet­ing or­ders, in­abil­i­ty to pro­cure es­sen­tial equip­ment and/or com­po­nents, more strin­gent cred­it terms and con­di­tions from sup­pli­ers, al­low­ing for in­crease cost and in­abil­i­ty to meet com­mit­ments to for­eign sup­pli­ers in a time­ly man­ner, im­pact­ing cred­i­bil­i­ty and lead­ing to ac­counts and goods/ser­vices be­ing placed on hold.

Alarm­ing­ly, the sur­vey al­so not­ed, 66 per cent of firms (135) re­ceived less than 50 per cent of their forex re­quire­ments from their lo­cal bankers in 2020.