The re­cent­ly re­brand­ed CIBC Caribbean Bank Ltd has con­firmed it has seen in­creased eco­nom­ic per­for­mance for the quar­ter end­ed Jan­u­ary 31, 2024.

In chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer Mark St Hill’s re­port for the quar­ter, he said the bank re­port­ed net in­come of $84.6 mil­lion, up $16.5 mil­lion or 24 per cent from the first quar­ter’s net in­come of $68.1 mil­lion, a year ago.

Ac­cord­ing to St Hill, af­ter ad­just­ing for $4.1 mil­lion of op­er­at­ing ex­pens­es re­lat­ing to pre­vi­ous­ly an­nounced di­vesti­tures in the Dutch Caribbean, ad­just­ed net in­come was $88.7 mil­lion.

He ex­plained the re­sults for the first quar­ter were pos­i­tive­ly im­pact­ed by cred­it loss ex­pense which re­flect­ed a re­lease this quar­ter due to a non-re­cur­ring re­cov­ery in the Ba­hamas and mod­el as­sump­tions up­dates.

“Re­sults for the rev­enue was up by one per cent from the first quar­ter a year ago against the back­drop of sta­ble US bench­mark in­ter­est rates since Ju­ly 2023, pos­i­tive­ly im­pact­ing our US dol­lar lend­ing port­fo­lio,” St Hill said.

He not­ed that the bank was pay­ing at­ten­tion to US bench­mark rates that are fore­cast­ed to start de­clin­ing from the sec­ond half of the fis­cal year.

St Hill added that the lo­cal cur­ren­cy lend­ing rates gen­er­al­ly re­mained at his­tor­i­cal­ly low lev­els re­flect­ing cur­rent mar­ket con­di­tions.

“We con­tin­ue to close­ly man­age op­er­at­ing ex­pens­es, while strate­gi­cal­ly in­vest­ing in our busi­ness and peo­ple. Op­er­at­ing ex­pens­es were down $1.6 mil­lion or two per cent from the first quar­ter last year large­ly due to low­er em­ploy­ee-re­lat­ed costs and tim­ing of oth­er ex­pens­es,” he said.

St Hill added that the bank was al­so pay­ing at­ten­tion to re­gion­al trends as the Caribbean is ex­pect­ed to see mod­er­ate growth.

How­ev­er, the bank re­mained mind­ful of geopo­lit­i­cal un­cer­tain­ties and po­ten­tial trade dis­rup­tions.

The bank’s CEO al­so ex­plained the bank’s de­ci­sion to re­brand from “First­Caribbean In­ter­na­tion­al Bank Ltd” to “CIBC Caribbean Bank Ltd.”

While the de­ci­sion was made in De­cem­ber, the re­brand took ef­fect on Jan­u­ary 30, 2024.

“The de­ci­sion to re­brand demon­strates CIBC’s con­tin­u­ing com­mit­ment to the re­gion and con­fi­dence in the con­tin­u­ing per­for­mance of our bank and its clients,” St Hill added.