Is There a Light At the End of the Correspondent Banking Tunnel?

Where the dreaded loss of correspondent banking relationships is concerned, PM Barrow says there is little to report following the CARICOM Heads of Government meeting held in Placencia recently. Coming out of that meeting a decision was taken to send a high-level mission on a round of meetings with federal regulators and other pertinent agencies. That decision hasn’t taken wings just yet, but there is some hint of good news where Belize is concerned.

Dean Barrow

Prime Minister Dean Barrow

“In terms of the operationalizing, I don’t know that that has happened and both things need to happen. But remember, if we move from CARICOM to Belize—from the general to the particular—we are well out the blocks. We continue with our Belize specific campaign. As I said we are in touch and just had an update from certainly the one bank that we were able to get the regulators in Washington to speak to and it would appear that they are certainly prepared to engage, perhaps not full scale…perhaps they might want to small and then grow. But it seems to me that we are making some progress, albeit, perhaps incremental. We, CARICOM apart and we welcome the fact of collectivity…also I saw the IMF that we spoke to when we went to Washington has now put forward a plan to try to assist. I can’t even remember the details, but there is activity—whether it is activity that will provide to be meaningful, I am not entirely sure—but at least something is happening. And we do feel that we have therefore made some progress and should be encourage to double our individual country effort even as we try to participate in the collective effort as well.”