ON March 1, 2024 Ramon Small-Ferguson took the reigns as CEO of Barita Investments. At 32, Small-Ferguson is one of the youngest CEOs of a major financial entity in Jamaica, overseeing an institution with $128 billion in assets and a market value of $87 billion at the end of trading on Tuesday.

But, what is his vision for leading Barita Investments, the cornerstone (no pun intended) of Cornerstone Financial Holdings Limited? Barita Investments is the most valuable asset owned by the group that bought 75 per cent of its stake for just over $3 billion in 2018.

“I’ve come up through the ranks of Barita in the last five years. I joined six months after Cornerstone took over Barita,” Small-Ferguson told the Jamaica Observer in a recent interview.

“I joined aligning myself around a vision of growth,” the former JN Fund Managers employee said. Small-Ferguson spent seven years at JN Fund Managers, and when he left he was the chief investment strategist and head of research of their investment banking subsidiary. At Barita, he joined to take over responsibility for asset management and research as vice-president for asset management and research.

Small-Ferguson said the vision that was sold to him then was a model aimed at focusing on expanding access to financial services for “the average man here in Jamaica and the region”.

But doing so meant the company had to raise capital, and lot’s of it, to make it “more capable”.

“So we went through a series of fund raisings. We went to the equity capital market four times and we raised over $33.5 billion, and that has really seen us becoming more capable financially. The business has grown. When the company was acquired we had about $3 billion in equity, about $16 billion to $18 billion in balance sheet assets. But, based on our last report, we would have shown just under $36 billion in equity and north of $130 billion in total assets on balance sheet.”

He said that infusion of capital has allowed the company to be more capable in its provision of solutions for its clients and to strengthen it against shocks and managing risks. For the most part, Barita Investments’s capital of $36 billion gives it a capital ratio, a measure of the funds it has in reserve against the riskier assets it holds that could be vulnerable in the event of a crisis, exceeds the regulatory requirement at 28 per cent. The regulatory minimum is 10 per cent.

“With that, you are in a position where the various attendant shocks associated with financial markets, as they come, you are better able to manage and withstand and sustain that risk – which is very important for the people we serve, very important for our customers and for your shareholders.”

But having secured capital to underpin its growth, Small-Ferguson said he is now laser-focused on achieving it. The company has invested in the brand and divided its strategy to focus on its customers by segment – retail, wealth management and corporate – and has recruited a strong team to help, including Dane Brodber who Small-Ferguson replaces as the head of Barita Investments, and Jeffery Romans, both of who were recruited from the Scotia Group. Then there is Terise Kettle, who is leading the investment banking segment. Others have been added to broaden the scope, depth and capacity of the business to perform in the sector.

“My objective is to really now, having put together this excellent portfolio of talents, to really build synergies, to get us running, I guess, like a well-oiled machine. It’s my objective to make, in this sector, Barita the place to work in this region.”

“It means, therefore, I am trying to elevate the standard with respect to employee well-being in this space – above even what is available in Jamaica.”

Taking care of employees, he said, is crucial if the company is to achieve its aim of continuously innovating to challenge the status quo and get them to focus on the customers.

“That concept simply means putting the customer at the centre of the universe.”

“Everybody always say they want to be customer-focused. We want our customers to be satisfied, but for us, the first port of call is setting up a mechanism for constant feedback. If we can revolve the business around our customers and innovate, then we will be able to realise the ultimate vision which is positively impacting the lives of the average man.”

“How we plan to do that? Well, in two ways. One, we want to make investing accessible,” he said as he highlighted that the main barrier is an information gap. “I think there are many people who could invest but don’t invest. They just don’t have the information, they feel locked out, they feel it’s not for them. And how do you change that? By providing information. And its not just making it available on a website; it’s figuring out how do you deliver the message to a broad cross section of people. And you have to tailor the message to each person in a scalable and sustainable way – you can’t go and knock on each door and provide the message.”

Small-Ferguson said the other part of impacting the average man is through bridging the gap of development that exists here in Jamaica and the region, and that he said starts with infrastructure – an area that Barita now plays in and intends to expand its presence in over the coming years.

“Let’s use energy as an area of opportunity in infrastructure development. In Jamaica the cost of energy is high, its north of US$0.30 cents per kilowatt hour at different points in time. There are new power plants that have been commissioned in different areas of the world that have power purchase agreements starting at US$0.04 cents per kilowatt hour. It means that there is a significant gap between our cost of electricity and the lowest cost of electricity across the world. You may say to yourself, ‘Well yes, we are in Jamaica,’ but technology makes it possible for the same power plant that has been set up and built in Germany, maybe on a smaller scale, can be built in Jamaica as well, built with the same technology, even the same guys can build it. So the question is why haven’t we seen a broad overhaul in electricity infrastructure in the region? My view is that it takes a whole lot of capital and you have to get interested parties to put their capital at risk to get into it, and the main conduit to make that happen has to be the capital markets. It has to be broker/dealers. There is a lot of work to do for us to create the opportunity and present it to the holders of capital who want to take on this kind of exposure – and that is just one area. There are tremendous possibilities to get that US$0.30-odd cents per kilowatt hour for electricity down. If we get it down by a third, the savings would be remarkable and it would be apparent in our economy. And there are many other things to do.”

Despite highlighting the energy sector, Small-Ferguson declined to say if Barita Investments is looking to enter that area to help raise financing for new power plants. However, the company has been actively looking at power projects across the world in the last few years.

He, however, said opportunities are being exploited in the real estate sector and Barita is taking advantage of it.

But he said with Jamaica’s fiscal situation improving in the last decade, “a lot more work has to come from the private sector, and I think mobilising capital is going to be a big catalyst of the growth in the next phase, so that is what our vision is centred around”.

Barita Investments itself has been funding several projects in the real estate sector. It is involved in a project to build several hundred homes in St Catherine, in a US$10-million project. There are more projects to come, but Small-Ferguson said he could not disclose them at this time.

But he said the finance house will be looking at raising funds for clients across the region to fund viable projects through “suitcase banking”, with it not having any plans right now to expand a block-and-steel presence outside of Jamaica. It, however, plans to open a branch in Portmore this year to give people who prefer a physical location to interact the chance to do so, and will “add a couple more branches”, though he said there is no intention to establish a huge branch network “like some of our competitors have done”.