Already having a presence in 13 markets across the Caribbean through its GK Life Insurance subsidiary, food and financial services group GraceKennedy is now positioning to enter at least two other territories.

CEO of the GK Group Don Wehby, in identifying Guyana and The Bahamas as the two territories, said they are now being considered among plans for the immediate future.

“Our life insurance acquisitions have been very successful and accretive and also cash-flow rich, so what we’re going to do now is to look at other markets. I’ve asked my team to look at Guyana and I’ve personally written to the regulators in that country to see if we can start a business there, and I know the management team is already looking at Bahamas,” he said during a virtually held investor briefing this week.

Acquired from Scotiabank in 2022, GK Life now operates in Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, and St Vincent and the Grenadines, Barbados, Belize, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands, and St Martin.

The 102-year-old conglomerate, at the end of the 2023 financial year, after securing $155 million in sales to earn US$1 billion of its US$2.1 billion Vision 2030 targeted revenues, saw more than $15 billion of its revenue coming from the insurance segment. The segment’s out-turn was also supported by contributions from Key Insurance and GK General Insurance. Insurance revenues last year were approximately $3 billion more than that of the previous year.

“We expect that GK’s life insurance business is going to be, in a short space of time, one of the leading contributors to the group, given the expansion plans we have. We’ll be looking at more distribution points and distributors, additional countries as well as new products and services,” Wehby said.

Relying on the services of Haven Technologies, the company said it will continue to digitise operations as it pushes to offer a number of creditor life products across territories.

Haven Technologies, a cloud-based quote-to-claim insurtech platform, which is also a multi-country, multi-currency solution, was tapped by GK last year — a time when the company said it would be investing upwards of US$1 million to implement new technology solutions.

“We launched in Antigua last year and we going to be rolling out the technology to the other countries in 2024. In terms of the scalability and expansion of GK Life in the Caribbean, I believe this is going to be a game-changer, and having a game-changer that is accretive and generating cash is always a good story for all of us,” Wehby said.