When leaders gather at the Caribbean Association of Banks conference, much of the conversation will be about capital: where it comes from, where it goes, and how quickly it gets there. Far less of it will be about the plumbing; how that capital technically gets from A to B. Yet the plumbing is what delivers trust, resilience and regional strength – the three themes anchoring this year’s discussion of how to secure the future of Caribbean banking.
The reality is that investment cannot easily reach a country that cannot reliably settle a dollar payment, and for much of the Caribbean the reliability of that connection has been in question for a decade.
The story is familiar to anyone who has run a Caribbean bank since 2015. Within the space of two or three years, several major international clearers withdrew correspondent banking relationships across the region. The cause was not anything the region’s banks had done. It was a repricing exercise at head offices in New York and London, prompted by a run of substantial enforcement penalties for anti-money-laundering (AML) failings. Once the potential cost of a compliance breach ran to hundreds of millions, the revenue earned from modest volumes in a small market stopped justifying the compliance overheads. The risk-reward calculation simply stopped working, and relationships that had existed for generations were closed with a letter.
For a bank in Belize or Montserrat, the loss of a correspondent relationship is not an inconvenience – it is the loss of the ability to pay for imports, to settle trade, to receive remittances, to function as a participant in the global economy at all. The withdrawal of the global banks may have been a decision taken at head office, but for the economies which relied on the support, it was a decision that cut deeply.
Crown Agents Bank has spent the past decade covering the gaps, staying steadfast to a region that has meant so much to our organisation. We already held relationships with central banks across the region, and as commercial banks lost their access, we extended the same clearing and settlement services to them. In several cases, that meant stepping in to provide the dollar lifeline an institution was about to lose. Those arrangements were not intended to be temporary bridges, and they have not proved to be. They have matured into long-standing multi-currency clearing relationships, and the portfolio has grown steadily across the islands.
So where does the region actually stand today? The honest answer is that de-risking is no longer the uniform regional phenomenon it was in 2016. Dollar clearers have begun to reconnect, particularly where growth prospects are strongest.
Markets with expanding energy, tourism and services sectors now generate volumes that satisfy the revenue threshold of a global bank, and the region’s banks have materially improved their controls. AML, customer due diligence, sanctions screening and wider financial crime compliance have all improved markedly in recent years, and growing automation means that work is now done more efficiently. Much of that progress was made alongside correspondents, ours included, precisely so that standards would reach a level a global clearer could accept.
That is the transferable lesson, and it is the same one visible in the African and Pacific corridors where access has been restored. Correspondent relationships are not won back through advocacy, they are won back through evidence: demonstrable controls, clean data, transparent ownership structures, and a counterparty willing to sit on the other side of the relationship and keep testing it. We review our clients’ standards routinely, and the regulatory expectations against which we review them keep rising. For a small institution, a compliance function that can withstand scrutiny is not a cost centre, it is market access.
But the recovery is a patchwork, and patchworks leave holes. The markets that have not seen clearers return are the ones where the underlying problem was never conduct in the first place. Thin liquidity and low margins in some countries are creating a regional divide.
One such country that represents the two ends of this spectrum is Guyana – a country which has undergone a rapid economic transformation in recent years, recording the highest real GDP growth rate in the world between 2022 and 2024, averaging 47 per cent annually. But Guyana hasn’t always been the unparalleled economic success story it is today.
Crown Agents Bank has supported Guyana for more than thirty years, including through the period when access to international markets and correspondent relationships became most difficult and others stepped away. This year, the Bank of Guyana granted us a licence to establish a permanent representative office in Georgetown – one of only three international financial institutions invited by the central bank and the Ministry of Finance to establish a permanent presence. It follows the opening of our New York office in 2025.
A permanent presence in a market is a different commitment from a line on a correspondent list. Local market presence, support and partnerships reflect an enduring value of Crown Agents Bank: The relationships that survive are the ones where experts are on the ground.
Trust, resilience and regional strength are the right ambitions, but none of them are served by rebuilding on a single point of failure. Correspondents concentrated in the largest markets is concentration, not resilience.
What the Caribbean needs is more than one route to settlement, in more than one currency, held with institutions whose commitment does not depend on the corridor being favourable on a given day.
By Simon Huckle, Head of Emerging Markets Financial Institutions, at Crown Agents Bank
