DEPUTY Governor of the Bank of Jamaica (BOJ) Jide Lewis says that all banks are expected to be prepared for the increased demand for cash during the upcoming holiday season.

“I think during Christmas time the seasonal increase in demand for currency would suggest that the banks will need to stock up additional funds,” he said.

Lewis, who has responsibility for the Financial Institutions Supervisory Division, was addressing the BOJ’s quarterly monetary policy report press conference on Monday.

He expressed confidence that the majority of the automated banking machines (ABMs) will be operational this holiday season. He noted that banks are being held to the minimum service standards for the operation of the machines, which were announced earlier this year.

These standards, which bring the banks under increased scrutiny but do not attract fines for breaches, are aimed at addressing long-standing concerns raised by consumers.

They provide that at least 90 per cent of ABMs must be working all the time and those that are operational must be working at least 95 per cent of the time.

In addition, machines located in urban, or resort areas must not be out of cash for more than 60 consecutive minutes, while the time out of cash for ABMs located in rural areas should be no more than 180 minutes or three hours.

Lewis said while some banks have not yet achieved the minimum standards, he is confident that things are heading in the right direction.

“The standards won’t give you a world where at no time you will not have an ABM that’s out of service. What the standards will do is give a certain outcome on average,” he pointed out.

“Recall that the standards say that 90 per cent of all ABMs owned by a deposit-taking institution (DTI) should be operational, so that means that 10 per cent at any given time may not be operational. Right now, the banks are operating at 94 per cent. We think that’s pretty good. Let’s see if they can bring that up to 96 per cent. But it does mean that in every given month you could have four or five per cent that will not be operational,” he said.

In addition, Lewis said that the ABMs that are operational are working 89 per cent to 90 per cent of the time. “There’s still room for improvement there,” he said, noting that the standards require that they should be working at least 95 per cent of the time.

Turning to recovery time, he said that this has fallen from six hours to about three hours, overall. While the banks have achieved the three-hour recovery time for rural areas, it is still not at the one-hour requirement for urban areas.

Nevertheless, he assured that at the current service standards, consumers should not experience any significant downtime or delays in getting cash this Christmas.

The BOJ is expected to roll out a new regulatory regime for the financial sector in 2026, which will impose fines on banks that are in breach of the ABM service standards.

— JIS