The Bankers’ As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T (BATT) has com­mend­ed the Gov­ern­ment’s ef­forts to close the deficit in Fi­nan­cial Year 2022 and in 2023.

Com­ment­ing on the re­cent fis­cal pack­age un­veiled by Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert on Mon­day, the BATT said the 2023 fis­cal pack­age fo­cus on the vul­ner­a­ble, low­er in­come groups, small and medi­um-sized en­ter­pris­es as well as its deep­er com­mit­ment to fi­nan­cial in­clu­sion, dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion, and the in­cor­po­ra­tion of re­new­ables with­in the en­er­gy mix are wel­comed mea­sures, close­ly aligned with BATT’s ad­vo­ca­cy.

It said it is par­tic­u­lar­ly en­cour­aged by the Gov­ern­ment’s con­tin­ued in­vest­ment in ICT in­fra­struc­ture and con­se­quent­ly its role in the dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion of the econ­o­my.

The fo­cus on tran­si­tion­ing to a cash­less so­ci­ety, dig­i­tal­is­ing Gov­ern­ment ser­vices, cou­pled with ex­pand­ed ini­tia­tives to ease the cost and time to do busi­ness in T&T are com­mend­ed, BATT added.

It al­so not­ed that ef­forts to cre­ate more ac­cess to fi­nan­cial ser­vices to un­banked and un­der­banked cit­i­zens across the coun­try are note­wor­thy as is the na­tion­al fi­nan­cial in­clu­sion sur­vey in­tend­ed to iden­ti­fy bar­ri­ers im­pact­ing “fi­nan­cial­ly un­der­served adults.”

“BATT ap­pre­ci­ates the Gov­ern­ment’s de­vel­op­ment of a re­new­able en­er­gy pol­i­cy and its pur­suit of a broad mix of projects in its en­er­gy tran­si­tion strat­e­gy in­clud­ing the Feed-in Tar­iff (FIT) Pol­i­cy to fa­cil­i­tate res­i­den­tial and com­mer­cial re­new­able en­er­gy gen­er­a­tion, and the planned con­struc­tion of the So­lar Pho­to­volta­ic en­er­gy plant,” the re­lease added.

BATT said it al­so looks for­ward to con­tin­u­ing its col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Gov­ern­ment in pro­vid­ing fi­nan­cial sup­port to SMEs through its pro­posed long-term loan guar­an­tee pro­gramme and reaf­firmed its com­mit­ment to im­prov­ing the lives of cit­i­zens.