KY­RON REG­IS

ky­ron.reg­is@guardian.co.tt

The Pres­i­dent and CEO of Re­pub­lic Fi­nan­cial Hold­ings Ltd (RFHL) Nigel Bap­tiste has ex­pressed that the im­pact of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic would be felt in the economies in which the group op­er­ates for an­oth­er fi­nan­cial year.

In RFHL’s 2020 an­nu­al re­port Bap­tiste said: “Over the next 12 months, the economies in which we op­er­ate will like­ly con­tin­ue to be im­pact­ed by the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.”

Bap­tiste added that in most re­gion­al coun­tries, do­mes­tic eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty has re­sumed, with many re­open­ing their bor­ders and tourism sec­tors to in­ter­na­tion­al vis­i­tors.

How­ev­er, he posit­ed that while com­mod­i­ty ex­port­ing coun­tries may per­form bet­ter at low­er lev­els of eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty, “the tourism in­dus­try may not cope well at this time as safe­ty con­cerns by po­ten­tial trav­ellers are like­ly to cause re­duced vis­i­tors to the Caribbean.”

The RFHL CEO al­so as­sert­ed that un­em­ploy­ment lev­els will like­ly in­crease over the next year as com­pa­nies would be forced to re­duce staff. Bap­tiste ar­gued that growth pro­jec­tions for 2020 and 2021 may be un­cer­tain.

Nonethe­less he not­ed that RFHL pro­gressed with its strat­e­gy of ac­qui­si­tion and ge­o­graph­ic di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion of in­come sources with the ac­qui­si­tion of Sco­tia­bank’s bank­ing op­er­a­tions in St Maarten and the East­ern Caribbean (An­guil­la, Do­mini­ca, Grena­da, St Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lu­cia, and St Vin­cent and the Grenadines).

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, Bap­tiste not­ed that the dri­ve to im­prove ef­fi­cien­cy through the im­ple­men­ta­tion of a com­mon IT plat­form across all of RFHL’s Caribbean sub­sidiaries al­so con­tin­ued over the past year.

He not­ed: “To date, con­ver­sion of the IT sys­tems has been com­plet­ed for sub­sidiaries in Suri­name, Cay­man Is­lands and Guyana, with work in the new ter­ri­to­ries, Grena­da and Bar­ba­dos cur­rent­ly un­der­way and oth­er sub­sidiaries to fol­low there­after.”

Ac­cord­ing to Bap­tiste, suc­cess­ful im­ple­men­ta­tion of this com­mon plat­form would en­able RFHL to of­fer its Caribbean clients a com­mon ex­pe­ri­ence and fa­cil­i­tate the in­tro­duc­tion of a shared sup­port ser­vices in­fra­struc­ture for im­proved ef­fi­cien­cy.

In his analy­sis and dis­cus­sion, Bap­tiste high­light­ed that the group’s gen­er­al ad­min­is­tra­tive ex­pens­es in­creased by $115 mil­lion or 13 per cent.

In­clud­ed in this as­sess­ment was T&T’s to­tal ad­min­is­tra­tive ex­pens­es in­creas­ing by $86.9 mil­lion due to in­creased le­gal and pro­fes­sion­al fees for digi­ti­sa­tion, strate­gic ini­tia­tives and soft­ware li­cens­es.

RFHL record­ed prof­it at­trib­ut­able to eq­ui­ty hold­ers of the par­ent of $904 mil­lion for the year end­ed Sep­tem­ber 30, 2020, a de­cline of $677.1 mil­lion or 42.8 per cent be­low the prof­it of $1.58 bil­lion re­port­ed in the pri­or year.

Ac­cord­ing to Bap­tiste, these re­sults re­flect the fi­nan­cial im­pact of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic on the group.