The Caribbean In­for­ma­tion & Cred­it Rat­ing Ser­vices Ltd (Cari­cris) has reaf­firmed “high­est cred­it­wor­thi­ness” rat­ing for Sagi­cor Life Ja­maica Ltd.

In a state­ment Cari­cris said this rat­ing in­cludes a cred­it up­lift for im­plied sup­port from SLJ’s ul­ti­mate par­ent com­pa­ny, Sagi­cor Fi­nan­cial Com­pa­ny Ltd (SFC), through its con­trol­ling in­ter­est in Sagi­cor Group Ja­maica Lim­it­ed (SGJ).

“The rat­ing in­di­cates that the lev­el of cred­it­wor­thi­ness of this oblig­or, ad­judged in re­la­tion to oth­er oblig­ors with­in Ja­maica is the high­est,” Cari­cris ex­plained.

Cari­cris has al­so main­tained a sta­ble out­look on the rat­ing which is based on Cari­cris’ ex­pec­ta­tion that SLJ will like­ly re­alise mod­est rev­enue growth over the next 12 to 15 months.

“We ex­pect the com­pa­ny to con­tin­ue to per­form well and main­tain its over­all lead­ing mar­ket po­si­tion in the in­sur­ance in­dus­try in Ja­maica.

“We fur­ther ex­pect the com­pa­ny to re­main ad­e­quate­ly cap­i­talised and meet all its debt oblig­a­tions and pol­i­cy­hold­er li­a­bil­i­ties as they come due over the pe­ri­od,” Cari­cris said.

Fur­ther, it said the rat­ing of SLJ is re­flec­tive of the com­pa­ny’s lead­ing mar­ket po­si­tion in the Ja­maica in­sur­ance in­dus­try as SLJ re­mains the largest life in­sur­ance com­pa­ny with sig­nif­i­cant mar­ket shares in sev­er­al busi­ness seg­ments.

In ad­di­tion, Cari­cris said its strong brand eq­ui­ty un­der­pinned by a com­pre­hen­sive suite of prod­ucts and ser­vices is sup­port­ed by a ro­bust dis­tri­b­u­tion net­work that en­ables the com­pa­ny to con­sis­tent­ly achieve a healthy fi­nan­cial per­for­mance.

The rat­ing is al­so sup­port­ed by SLJ’s over­all fi­nan­cial sta­bil­i­ty, con­tin­ued healthy prof­itabil­i­ty and fi­nan­cial strength, as mea­sured by its strong cap­i­tal­i­sa­tion lev­el, in ex­cess of the reg­u­la­to­ry re­quire­ment, the rat­ing agency said.

“These sup­port­ing fac­tors, how­ev­er, are tem­pered by SLJ’s sig­nif­i­cant busi­ness and fi­nan­cial ex­po­sure to the high­ly in­debt­ed Ja­maican econ­o­my.

“In ad­di­tion, a low in­ter­est rate en­vi­ron­ment can chal­lenge SLJ’s as­set li­a­bil­i­ty man­age­ment po­si­tion go­ing for­ward, there­by ad­verse­ly im­pact­ing its long-term busi­ness, al­though rates are ex­pect­ed to in­crease in 2022,” Cari­cris al­so not­ed.