The Unit Trust Cor­po­ra­tion’s (UTC) net in­come for its 2022 fi­nan­cial year was $52 mil­lion, a dip of $20 mil­lion or 27.7 per cent from its 2021 in­come, ac­cord­ing to the cor­po­ra­tion’s 2022 an­nu­al re­port.

At the mu­tu­al fund com­pa­ny’s an­nu­al meet­ing held at the Gov­ern­ment Cam­pus au­di­to­ri­um in Port-of-Spain yes­ter­day, the UTC’s Chief Fi­nan­cial Of­fi­cer Ker­ri Ma­haraj said this per­for­mance was cred­itable giv­en the eco­nom­ic cli­mate cre­at­ed by the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic and the Rus­sia-Ukraine con­flict.

“What is al­so im­por­tant is to re­mem­ber that 2020 and 2021 were very dif­fi­cult years. And those head­winds have not stopped. We still have in­fla­tion, the Rus­sia Ukraine war is still hap­pen­ing. So to be able to main­tain a prof­itabil­i­ty, a rel­a­tive­ly con­sis­tent prof­itabil­i­ty of over $50 mil­lion is a re­al­ly great achieve­ment,” said Ma­haraj, who al­so point­ed out that while prof­its dipped the UTC’s cap­i­tal po­si­tion in­creased to $1.64b in 2022 from $1.59m in 2021.

UTC ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor, Nigel Ed­wards, al­so ac­knowl­edged the chal­lenges the UTC faced in its tran­si­tion to new chip cards which ad­verse­ly af­fect­ed cus­tomers.

Ed­wards said, “I’m very painful­ly aware that our cus­tomers have ex­pe­ri­enced some chal­lenges as we moved through the im­ple­men­ta­tion. And in some in­stances, there are still in­ter­mit­tent pe­ri­ods where cus­tomers en­counter in­con­ve­niences that re­lates to wait times and card trans­ac­tions. The fact is our ex­pe­ri­ence with the new card sys­tem has fall­en way short of our ex­pec­ta­tion of ser­vice de­liv­ery to you. I give you the as­sur­ance that our team is work­ing tire­less­ly and work­ing col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly with all our part­ners, both lo­cal­ly and in­ter­na­tion­al­ly to en­sure that you get 100 per cent trans­ac­tion suc­cess and sat­is­fac­tion. That’s our goal and that’s what we are promis­ing to de­liv­er to you.”

Ed­wards how­ev­er hailed the UTC’s re­gion­al ex­pan­sion in Ja­maica and the East­ern Caribbean as he said he hoped to cre­ate wealth cre­ation op­por­tu­ni­ties for the Caribbean through the lessons learnt in the Trinidad and To­ba­go mar­ket.