CIBC FirstCaribbean has announced four new one-off scholarships for female finance students in honour of retiring Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Colette Delaney, the first woman to head the regional bank.

In making the announcement recently, incoming CEO Mark St Hill hailed his predecessor as a “champion for women, girls and diversity and inclusion at our bank”.

He said the bank could not think of a more fitting tribute to honour Delaney, a career banker who has been with the bank for the past nine years and CEO for the past four, than to “offer these scholarships to four deserving young women from across the region”.

The Colette Delaney Scholarship for Women in Business Studies will allow four young women across the Caribbean region to realise their dreams of pursuing studies in the field of business or banking & finance at the UWI campus of their choice.

St Hill said during her tenure Delaney set up the Women’s Network for females in the bank — a support group for senior women in the bank as they navigate the corporate world. She also placed renewed emphasis on developing regional people, evidenced by the number of management training programmes for senior leadership and mentorship programmes for employees at all levels that were established.

He added that she also promoted a number of regional people to the bank’s senior executive team.

St Hill said Delaney, the immediate past chair of the bank’s charitable arm, the FirstCaribbean International ComTrust Foundation, took a deep satisfaction in the impact the work of the foundation had on communities and institutions across the region, especially its award of scores of undergraduate and post-graduate scholarships every year to students of The University of the West Indies.

Delaney said she was “touched and truly honoured that four deserving young women across the region will have another route to educational advancement with these scholarships offered by the bank”.

Her appointment as chief executive officer, the first woman to be appointed to the role, was a landmark in the bank’s history. She brought to her tenure as CEO the steady hand that the bank needed especially during turbulence caused by the novel coronavirus pandemic. Her ability to reassure both employees and clients of the bank’s stability and support helped to assuage the concerns of our various stakeholders during that testing period.