There may be light at the end of the tun­nel for av­er­age cit­i­zens hop­ing to ac­cess for­eign ex­change, with Prime Min­is­ter Stu­art Young re­veal­ing that a po­ten­tial so­lu­tion has al­ready been iden­ti­fied.

Young made the state­ment dur­ing an in­ter­view on Guardian Me­dia’s Slam 100.5FM on Tues­day, just weeks af­ter his March 25 meet­ing with rep­re­sen­ta­tives from the bank­ing sec­tor to dis­cuss the al­lo­ca­tion of for­eign ex­change, along with bank fees and charges. A fol­low-up meet­ing took place on April 4.

“There is an area I’ve asked the Cen­tral Bank and the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance to look at that I think can pro­vide some al­le­vi­a­tion in that area,” he said, though he did not spec­i­fy what the pro­posed mea­sure en­tailed.

While ac­knowl­edg­ing that Trinidad and To­ba­go cur­rent­ly earns less for­eign ex­change than in pre­vi­ous years—mean­ing re­duced avail­abil­i­ty over­all—Young ex­pressed con­fi­dence that a work­able so­lu­tion is near.

“I want to find a way that ex­act­ly as you said, av­er­age cit­i­zen could go in­to the bank... You might­en be able to walk out, you’re not go­ing to be able to walk out with no US$50,000, US$10,000 and this kind of thing but enough that you could go about and do your busi­ness,” he said.

“There was some­thing that came out of that meet­ing. I’ve asked them to pur­sue it be­cause of course you need to make sure that, again, is an eq­ui­table sys­tem. You need to make sure that what you’re try­ing to achieve has the in­tend­ed pur­pose when you im­ple­ment it.”

Young high­light­ed his ad­min­is­tra­tion’s com­mit­ment to iden­ti­fy­ing and im­ple­ment­ing in­no­v­a­tive so­lu­tions quick­ly.

“That was with­in four weeks. I am not giv­ing up that fight,” he said.

He al­so weighed in on long-stand­ing pub­lic frus­tra­tion over bank charges, es­pe­cial­ly among low­er-in­come cit­i­zens, promis­ing to ad­dress the is­sue.

“That’s some­thing I in­tend to take up be­cause it does af­fect the av­er­age cit­i­zen. You’re ask­ing for me to move to vir­tu­al bank­ing and to on­line bank­ing, sure­ly that re­duces ad­min­is­tra­tive charges be­cause what you've done, you've re­duced staff, you’ve re­duced branch­es, so you’ve re­duced cost. Things be­ing done on com­put­ers and through the use of tech­nol­o­gy and this type of thing is sup­posed to make it more ef­fi­cient and more cost-ef­fec­tive. That has to trick­le down to the cus­tomer.”

Young em­pha­sised that the fo­cus re­mains on en­sur­ing that the fi­nan­cial sys­tem works for the av­er­age cit­i­zen, not just larg­er stake­hold­ers.

Sworn in as Prime Min­is­ter on March 17, he pri­ori­tised meet­ing with the bank­ing sec­tor dur­ing his first week in of­fice.

More re­cent­ly, on April 18, the Min­istry of Fi­nance an­nounced that Small and Medi­um En­ter­pris­es (SMEs) would now be able to ac­cess up to US$50,000 per month for in­ter­na­tion­al busi­ness trans­ac­tions through a fa­cil­i­ty man­aged by the Ex­port-Im­port Bank of T&T (Ex­im­bank), a move wel­comed by lo­cal busi­ness groups.

Young re­it­er­at­ed his com­mit­ment to sta­bil­is­ing the econ­o­my, stream­lin­ing ac­cess to grants, and en­sur­ing that cit­i­zens can main­tain fi­nan­cial in­de­pen­dence while still qual­i­fy­ing for nec­es­sary as­sis­tance.