BRIDGETOWN, Barbados – Two students of the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill will receive special gifts from outgoing Chief Executive Officer of CIBC FirstCaribbean International Bank Rik Parkhill.

The two are beneficiaries of one-off Rik Parkhill Scholarships worth BDS$10, 000 each. BDS$1 is equivalent to roughly JM$60.

Parkhill, who assumed leadership of the bank in 2011 in the midst of the global economic recession, is credited with leading a team which turned around the fortunes of the 13-year old bank — a merger of the former Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and Barclays — and which recorded net income of US$97 million at end of the last fiscal year.

During his tenure, and specifically as chairman of the bank’s Comtrust Foundation, the charitable arm of the financial institution, he championed many community-based social, environmental and educational causes and strengthened the bank’s longstanding Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the UWI.

His tenure ends on December 31 this year.

At a recent dinner for members of the bank’s board of directors where the scholarships were announced, board member Christina Kramer hailed the departing CEO, who formerly worked at the Toronto Stock Exchange before joining CIBC in 2008, as “an incredibly intelligent, hard-working, collaborative and respectful leader”.

“As Rik leaves at the end of this year, our business is much stronger, our financial results have improved, losses are down, and we are well positioned to begin the next phase of our journey to help drive growth,” Kramer, executive vice-president, Retail Distribution and Channel Strategy at CIBC, said.

She added that Parkhill also provided “visible leadership to our team across the region and represented CIBC FirstCaribbean very effectively with key stakeholders including government, media, and our clients”.

In addition to these two scholarship awards, CIBC FirstCaribbean awards 15 scholarships annually to undergraduate and post-graduate students of the UWI as part of the longstanding MoU. It also offered a one-off Student Empowerment Scholarship earlier this year as part of the bank’s Adopt-a-Cause programme.

The bank also offers research grants for post graduate students and supports a number of lectures as part of the MoU.