De­spite what may have been said on po­lit­i­cal plat­forms, Guardian Hold­ings Lim­it­ed (GHL) is not just hold­ing steady, the com­pa­ny is stand­ing firm.

In an in­ter­view with Sun­day Busi­ness on Fri­day, GHL CEO Ian Chi­napoo, said that it is the most sta­ble com­pa­ny to which he has been at­tached.

“Guardian Life of the Caribbean, for ex­am­ple, is re­quired to main­tain a cap­i­tal ad­e­qua­cy of 150 per cent. In bank­ing, what does that mean? You might keep 170 to 200 per cent, just to keep some safe­ty. Guardian Life of the Caribbean is at 336 per cent cap­i­tal ad­e­qua­cy,’ said Chi­napoo, who took over as the fi­nan­cial ser­vices group’s top ex­ec­u­tive on Oc­to­ber 1, 2022.

“The num­bers are there. And they’ve been that way for some time. That’s not last year we hit that it’s been over 300 per cent for a long time. So in terms of any con­cern about that, this is one of the safest and strongest or­gan­i­sa­tions that I have ever worked in,” he said.

It is not the first time in the past few weeks that Chi­napoo has had to state reaf­fir­ma­tions of the com­pa­ny’s strength in the pub­lic.

GHL was placed in pub­lic fo­cus dur­ing the re­cent­ly con­clud­ed Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Elec­tions cam­paign, when Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar ques­tioned the sta­bil­i­ty of the com­pa­ny giv­en its con­nec­tion with Ja­maica’s NCB Fi­nan­cial Group (NCBFG), which owns about 62 per cent of the T&T in­sur­ance com­pa­ny.

The op­po­si­tion leader sug­gest­ed that fi­nan­cial chal­lenges faced by the NCB’s Ja­maica bank could lead to a GHL col­lapse akin to Cli­co’s fail­ure in Jan­u­ary 2009.

No­tably, GHL’s fi­nan­cial re­port for the six-month pe­ri­od end­ed June 30 was re­leased lat­er the same week as Per­sad-Bisses­sar’s com­ments. Those fi­nan­cials de­tail sig­nif­i­cant prof­its and in­deed im­proved per­for­mance par­tic­u­lar­ly when com­pared with the first quar­ter of this fis­cal year, which Chi­napoo re­it­er­at­ed in the in­ter­view at the Guardian Group head of­fice in West­moor­ings.

“We did have an in­crease in claims that ac­tu­al­ly has con­tin­ued. But notwith­stand­ing that, I’m quite hap­py that we have ac­tu­al year-on-year net prof­it im­prov­ment of 95%, re­turns re­al­ly heav­i­ly dri­ven by our in­vest­ment or im­prove­ments in our in­vest­ment port­fo­lio. We sig­nif­i­cant­ly im­proved on that per­for­mance, which is kind of the sig­nal I was telling you about in the first quar­ter that we saw that turn­around, but we’re very hap­py with the per­for­mance year to date. And, you know, we re­al­ly are push­ing for­ward to main­tain that mo­men­tum,” he said.

He stressed that the com­pa­ny was out­do­ing its pre-pan­dem­ic per­for­mances, while not­ing that the com­pa­ny had not suf­fered sig­nif­i­cant­ly dur­ing the pan­dem­ic ei­ther.

“We’re get­ting back to pre-pan­dem­ic lev­els. Of course, dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, you had much few­er peo­ple dri­ving, you’d have few­er ac­ci­dents, few­er mo­tor claims. But you had an uptick in health claims. So in terms of re­turn to pre-pan­dem­ic lev­els, we were on our way there in fact. We are prob­a­bly in ex­cess of where we were, in pre-pan­dem­ic be­cause we have made oth­er in­vest­ments not re­lat­ed to the pan­dem­ic in terms of ef­fi­cien­cy and tech­nol­o­gy,” said Chi­napoo.

“Our per­for­mance over­all is above pre-pan­dem­ic lev­els, if you were to com­pare to 2018/19 to 2022/23,” he added.

The fi­nan­cial ex­ec­u­tive said for the six month pe­ri­od to June 30, 2023, GHL gen­er­at­ed $2.65 bil­lion in in­sur­ance rev­enues, which was an 11 per cent im­prove­ment over the same pe­ri­od in 2022. The 2022 in­sur­ance rev­enues were al­so growth over 2021.

“So we are ful­ly back at that lev­el in terms of pre-pan­dem­ic. We ac­tu­al­ly did not have a re­duc­tion dur­ing the pan­dem­ic in terms of all our rev­enues and prof­its. That was not our ex­pe­ri­ence. What we do have now is a re­turn to things like elec­tive surg­eries and so on. So we have an uptick in claims, par­tic­u­lar­ly health, which is re­al­ly a bit of a back­log be­cause, dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, things like im­por­tant but elec­tive surg­eries and such were de­ferred. So in Ja­maica and Trinidad and To­ba­go you’d see a resur­gence of peo­ple com­ing to do those surg­eries. And we have an uptick in claims which we do be­lieve will set­tle out over time notwith­stand­ing that we are still per­form­ing well,” he said.

Chi­napoo con­firmed that GHL in­deed did co-arrange a $2 bil­lion bond for the Gov­ern­ment of T&T a cou­ple months ago along­side NCB Cap­i­tal Mar­kets.

“It was a joint deal. We were co-arrangers in late June, we would have arranged that $2 bil­lion deal. Heav­i­ly be­cause Guardian Life Of The Caribbean need­ed as­sets. And that was a long-term bond. So that was our in­ter­est. And we’ve in­vest­ed in that bond be­cause of our long-term li­a­bil­i­ty pro­file. So yes, we have Guardian Group Trust Ltd was the co-arranger and Guardian Life of The Caribbean was one of the in­vestors in it,” said Chi­napoo, “We just bought an­oth­er $100 mil­lion so I think it’s rough­ly about $600 mil­lion. I can con­firm but about 600 mil­lion of that is plus or mi­nus.”

He how­ev­er said de­spite this, the com­pa­ny was well di­ver­si­fied while stay­ing in keep­ing with the In­sur­ance Act re­quire­ments.

“We have 54 per cent of our book in sov­er­eign se­cu­ri­ties but that in­cludes Ja­maica and East­ern Caribbean and oth­ers as well. So we are heav­i­ly in­vest­ed in sov­er­eign se­cu­ri­ties, as are all life in­sur­ance com­pa­nies in T&T be­cause of the re­quire­ments of the In­sur­ance Act in terms of what we can in­vest in. But we are hap­py to in­vest in those in­stru­ments be­cause we con­sid­er them quite safe.”

Chi­napoo said the com­pa­ny was al­so fair­ly con­fi­dent in its stand­ing de­spite the re­cent ac­qui­si­tion of Colfire by ANSA McAL’s in­sur­ance sub­sidiary TATIL. That deal re­port­ed­ly grant­ed TATIL 23 per cent of the in­sur­ance mar­ket share in T&T.

“I think we’re still by far the largest in the prop­er­ty and ca­su­al­ty busi­ness in the Caribbean. And we con­tin­ue to bring our val­ue to the ta­ble and hope that oth­ers step up their game as well be­cause it’s on­ly the cus­tomers who will ben­e­fit,” said Chi­napoo.

He al­so stressed that de­spite the po­lit­i­cal pub­lic­i­ty, there had been no sign that GHL’s cus­tomers were con­cerned.

Chi­napoo said, “We are 176 years old. And we have in­sured fam­i­lies and their de­scen­dants and their ben­e­fi­cia­ries. And so, as I men­tioned, we have al­most 230,000 poli­cies, which means 200,000 fam­i­lies. we’ve been around a long time and we’re in for the long game. So our fo­cus has been on en­sur­ing our cus­tomers un­der­stand and our share­hold­ers un­der­stand that our busi­ness­es are safe, strong, se­cure, and sol­id as bedrock, not just rock.”