Kim, an Old Harbour, St Catherine, businesswoman, walked into the Scotiabank automated banking machine (ABM) in the centre of the town last Friday to make a deposit, but left frustrated. The machine, housed at the location of a shuttered branch, rejected her cash repeatedly.

Her experience is far from unique. Across Jamaica, businesses and individuals grapple with unreliable ABMs, particularly in towns where banks have retreated, leaving machines as the sole lifeline for financial transactions.

“It’s impossible to deposit. You know how many times I have to leave Old Harbour just to go into Kingston to get banking done?” Kim told the Jamaica Observer Friday. The next nearest towns, May Pen in Clarendon and Spanish Town in St Catherine, are just 20 kilometres away, but Kim prefers to travel the 40 kilometres it takes to get into Kingston to do her business because both towns are deemed unsafe.

Kim was speaking to Sunday Finance shortly after we were done talking to Treacha Reid, the owner of Shades of Elegance, a spa based in Old Harbour, about the same issues facing businesspeople in the town. Reid is also the representative of the St Catherine Chamber of Commerce in south St Catherine, and Kim had visited to complain that the Scotiabank machine was not accepting her deposits.

“The machine doesn’t accept any of the money. It spits them out. Sometimes we try to deposit and it accepts only one note or two,” she pointed out.

Reid herself raised a similar complaint with the Bank of Jamaica (BOJ) at the recently held monetary policy press briefing. She said she raised the issue last September and has seen no resolution since.

“I’m sorry for the citizens in Old Harbour. The sun is hot, the machine doesn’t work, and it’s really chaotic…where the BNS machine is concerned, especially for the elderly as well,” Reid told the BOJ after complaining of not being able to do deposits at the one of five Scotiabank ABMs in Old Harbour with that function. She wants the central bank to pressure commercial banks to meet the requirement for their ABMs in operation to be working the minimum 95 per cent of the time as set out in the guidelines, especially in towns like Old Harbour, where Scotiabank has closed it branch.

And her complaint is supported by data published by the BOJ each month. The latest of those data are for March 2025 — the ABM performance report is published with a two-month lag — and it shows that while banks have increased the number of machines installed islandwide from 891 in January 2024 to 902 in March 2025 with about 97 per cent of them operating, these machines, on average, were down more than the central bank wants.

The BOJ’s guidelines are for banks to have those 878 functional machines working 95 per cent of the time. That would mean they should work for 22 hours and 48 mins of everyday. And if they should go down, the banks must ensure they are up and running again within an hour if the machines are located in urban areas, and within three hours for machines at rural locations.

Yet, despite the BOJ publishing those standards in April last year and telling them to fall in line by January 2025, three months later in March, the banks collectively reported that their machines were up only 92 per cent of the time.

“Yes, banks are still struggling with the uptime, so they are not at a 95 per cent level, they are somewhere in the low 90s,” Jide Lewis, deputy governor at the BOJ with responsibility for financial institutions, responded when asked about the issue.

But their struggle is not new. The BOJ has been publishing data on ABM performances for each month, starting with January 2024, and in the 13 months up to March 2025 for which data are already available the 95 per cent uptime standard was met countrywide in only January 2024.

First Global Bank, one of the nation’s smallest commercial banks, consistently exceeded the requirement across the island while the others performed well in some areas and fell down in others. The worst offenders: Scotiabank and JN Bank, according to the BOJ data.

“The two banks that you mentioned haven’t been at that amount of the 95 per cent or in excess, so that’s something that we continue to dialogue with them about,” Lewis continued. In March, JN Bank’s machines were up 87 per cent of the time islandwide. At the same time, Scotiabank’s machines were up on average 89 per cent. Rural areas were hit hardest with the average uptime of machines at 86 per cent. Non-compliance attracts no monetary fine, but only generates regulatory concerns.

“With Scotia, the challenges have been more in relation to the machines being able to receive deposits. Sometimes there is a high rejection rate of the notes and that’s something that their technical team is working on to allow them to hit that 95 per cent uptime requirement,” Lewis said, confirming the complaint from the Old Harbour businesswomen.

“It always irritates me, because obviously it can be fixed,” Kim said of the machines not accepting her deposits. “If it is working in Kingston, there should be no reason why it can’t work anywhere else.”

“This is a fast-growing community. I’m probably sure if you should check statistics, this is probably one of the fastest-growing areas right now. It needs to be fixed. Having issues like these in a town where the bank has closed its branch shows a lack of respect for people,” Reid added.

Scotiabank told Sunday Finance it is “aware of challenges being experienced” by its customers when they try to use the ABMs to make deposits.

“Regrettably, this issue stems from incorrect usage,” Scotiabank said in written responses to queries from Sunday Finance. “The ABMs are primarily a personal banking channel and not designed to manage high-volume deposits or withdrawals by business clients. This issue has resulted in machines reaching deposit capacity much faster as well as undue wear and tear on parts which both result in deposit failures,” the bank adds.

Scotiabank said to rectify the issues, it has increased the frequency of maintenance at the machines to reduce the downtime and disruptions in service.

“We also understand the challenges faced by our business banking clients and we are reviewing various alternatives to help them to manage their deposits,” the bank pointed out.

In towns where there isn’t a branch present, the bank said business clients can make their deposits via its third party cash-in-transit partners who will collect the cash, following which the funds will be credited to the clients account.

“Clients can also use the depository service at the nearest branch,” it continued.

The problems with being able to make deposits at the bank which has their business accounts, the businesswomen say they are turning to opening new accounts at other banks with branches in Old Harbour, make the deposits there and then transfer to their Scotiabank to conduct their business.

“It’s really because my banking information is with so many other companies that I deal with, and I have it saved on so many other sites or so that I’d use or whatever. It’s really just because of that and the inconvenience of me changing, why I don’t offer another bank account,” Kim noted.

But machines being unable to accept deposits or being out of service more frequent than the BOJ would like are not Scotiabank’s only problems. With 902 machines installed and only 878 in operation, 24 have been reported as being not operating. Of that sum, 22 were Scotiabank machines in March. The other two belonged to JN Bank.

“[JN] has a portfolio of ABMs that are past their best life, so they are prone to break down more often than would be desirable. So we have spoken to them about that. They are deploying…a whole fleet of ABMs over the next six months.”

Lewis said the BOJ would continue to monitor the roll-out.

“We are expecting that when that new set of ABMs are deployed across their network, the downtime will be reduced and they will be able to bring themselves into compliance with the 95 per cent.”

Treacha Reid, a businesswoman in Old Harbour, St Catherine, is pressing to get the Bank of Jamaica to hold commercial banks accountable when they fall below the required guidelines for the operation of their ABMs.

LEWIS… banks are still struggling with the uptime.