Nadaleen Singh

The First Cit­i­zens Group is re­port­ing an in­crease in loan ap­pli­ca­tion for the first quar­ter of 2012. Chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer, Lar­ry Howai, said: "On­line trans­ac­tions are up about 18 per cent, loans are up, and prof­it is ten per cent up over the com­par­a­tive pe­ri­od for last year. The num­bers have been pret­ty good for us." Howai was speak­ing to the Busi­ness Guardian last week af­ter the open­ing cer­e­mo­ny of the Trade and In­vest­ment Con­ven­tion (TIC), which was held at the Hy­att Re­gency Trinidad ho­tel, Wright­son Road, Port-of-Spain, from May 16 to 19. He said the growth of loan ap­pli­ca­tions is ex­pect­ed "to hold up" for the rest of 2012. "The pre­lim­i­nary re­sults I saw for April, which is the first month of the next half of the year, showed our mort­gage loans, for ex­am­ple, are way up above bud­get." Howai al­so gave an up­date on the work of its Cos­ta Ri­ca of­fice, the open­ing of which was an­nounced in Jan­u­ary. "The Cos­ta Ri­can of­fice just closed one large trans­ac­tion. We got it go­ing about a month ago." Asked about the na­ture of the "large trans­ac­tion," Howai said: "Due to cus­tomer con­fi­den­tial­i­ty, we can­not dis­cuss the trans­ac­tion oth­er than to say we are pret­ty pleased with it."

"It (the com­pa­ny) is a group that has op­er­a­tions through­out the Caribbean and we were able to do a piece of fi­nanc­ing for them, which cer­tain­ly helped to get the book in Cos­ta Ri­ca go­ing," he said. The for­mal open­ing of the Cos­ta Ri­can of­fice is set for Ju­ly. Re­gard­ing But­ter­field Bank (Bar­ba­dos) Ltd, which the First Cit­i­zens Group is in the process of ac­quir­ing, Howai said: "We ex­pect to close the ac­qui­si­tion of the But­ter­field Bank by mid-Au­gust." Asked what made the Bar­ba­dos bank at­trac­tive to First Cit­i­zens, Howai said: "Sta­bil­i­ty of the econ­o­my and it was one of the bet­ter-run and stronger economies in the re­gion. The in­vest­ment was there. "We have been look­ing at Bar­ba­dos as an in­vest­ment grade-rat­ed coun­try that we should ex­pand our busi­ness in­to for quite a while. The op­por­tu­ni­ty came up and we thought we would take ad­van­tage of it." With just five branch­es the cost of the ac­qui­si­tion was about US $45 mil­lion.

More ac­qui­si­tions are to come.

"We con­tin­ue to look at the in­vest­ment-grade rat­ed coun­tries. We are look­ing at the Ba­hamas, Bermu­da and a few oth­er coun­tries like that, so we are look­ing at those op­por­tu­ni­ties but, it has to be the right op­por­tu­ni­ty at the right price." Com­ment­ing on the bank's over­all per­for­mance, Howai said the bank per­formed well giv­en "the con­cerns in the glob­al econ­o­my." "The chal­lenges re­main what is hap­pen­ing in the ex­ter­nal en­vi­ron­ment, what is hap­pen­ing in the world at large. "If Eu­rope slows down-they have al­ready slowed down-if the Unit­ed States starts to slow down, that takes a big piece out of the glob­al econ­o­my and we can ex­pect that some of the emerg­ing mar­kets will then start to be af­fect­ed, Chi­na and Brazil, for ex­am­ple, and then that com­pounds the ef­fects. "Our big con­cerns are what a glob­al slow­ing could have on us here in T&T and the po­ten­tial ef­fect that it could have on com­mod­i­ty prices, like oil and gas and so on.

"The T&T econ­o­my re­mains strong and we have strong for­eign ex­change re­serves, so we think the Gov­ern­ment should be able to cush­ion the ef­fect of any glob­al slow­down. We re­main op­ti­mistic, but we are aware there re­main some chal­lenges be­ing posed to us from out­side. "I am see­ing in­vest­ments tak­ing place in oth­er coun­tries. There are in­vest­ments tak­ing place on a glob­al scale by many of our lo­cal in­vestors, but I wouldn't call that cap­i­tal flight. It is not cap­i­tal flight. It is look­ing for op­por­tu­ni­ties that make sense and broad­en the flow of mon­ey in­to T&T."