Caribbean In­for­ma­tion and Cred­it Rat­ing Ser­vices Lim­it­ed (Cari­CRIS) has as­signed ini­tial is­suer/cor­po­rate cred­it rat­ings of jmA+ (Lo­cal Cur­ren­cy Rat­ing) and jmA (For­eign Cur­ren­cy Rat­ing) on the Ja­maica na­tion­al scale to JMMB Group Lim­it­ed (JMM­BGL). These na­tion­al scale rat­ings in­di­cate that the lev­el of cred­it­wor­thi­ness of this oblig­or, ad­judged in re­la­tion to oth­er oblig­ors in Ja­maica is good.

A me­dia re­lease from the JMMB Group yes­ter­day said that the rat­ings are sup­port­ed by the Group’s strong brand and long his­to­ry in the Ja­maican se­cu­ri­ties in­dus­try as well as its emer­gence as a re­gion­al fi­nan­cial ser­vices play­er.

JMM­BGL is a fi­nan­cial ser­vices Group in­cor­po­rat­ed and domi­ciled in Ja­maica and list­ed on the Stock Ex­changes of Ja­maica and T&T.

“JMM­BGL’s well-di­ver­si­fied as­set port­fo­lio with good as­set qual­i­ty, as well as its good fi­nan­cial per­for­mance, com­fort­able cap­i­tal­i­sa­tion lev­el and ro­bust gov­er­nance struc­ture and risk man­age­ment prac­tices, al­so serve to sup­port the rat­ings. These rat­ing strengths are tem­pered by the Group’s high cost to in­come ra­tio as well as the mod­er­ate con­cen­tra­tion in re­pur­chase agree­ment (re­po) in­stru­ments that char­ac­teris­es its fund­ing base. The slug­gish eco­nom­ic con­di­tions in Trinidad and To­ba­go (T&T) which could con­strain the Group’s growth, al­so tem­per the rat­ings.”

The me­dia re­lease added that Cari­CRIS has al­so as­signed a sta­ble out­look on the rat­ings.

“The sta­ble out­look is premised on Cari­CRIS’ ex­pec­ta­tion that the Group’s fi­nan­cial per­for­mance will con­tin­ue to be good over the next 12-15 months, but­tressed by the fi­nal­i­sa­tion of its up to US $250 mil­lion in­vest­ment in Align­nvest Class B shares, that will con­vert to com­mon shares in Sagi­cor Fi­nan­cial Cor­po­ra­tion, which could serve to in­crease its prof­itabil­i­ty and fur­ther ex­pand its mar­ket pres­ence in the Caribbean. In ad­di­tion, we ex­pect the im­proved eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty in Ja­maica to­geth­er with the on­go­ing stan­dard­i­s­a­tion and branch in­te­gra­tion ini­tia­tives in the Group to un­der­pin con­tin­ued growth and im­proved op­er­at­ing ef­fi­cien­cies over the pe­ri­od.” The re­lease read.