ROBERT Almeida, group chief executive of NCB Financial Group and chairman of its banking subsidiary National Commercial Bank Jamaica (NCBJ), has identified rampant debit card replacements and the labour-intensive correction of payment errors as prime targets in a new drive to slash the bank’s costly operational inefficiencies.

The goal is to cut the bank’s cost-to-income ratio from over 80 per cent down “into the 60s”, a key target in its shift to sustainable growth. This imperative is underscored by the parent company’s financials, which reveal that while the NCB Financial Group’s consolidated cost-to-income ratio stood at 69 per cent, the banking company’s stand-alone efficiency metric was above 85 per cent in the last financial year — highlighting the acute need for improvement at the core banking unit level.

Almeida stated the bank’s renewed focus is locked on “efficiency and customer experience.” “No customer wants to be waiting for something because we take long to do it. So the more efficient we get, the better the customer experience we’ll get. And so that’s where our twin focus is,” he said.

Almeida quantified the problem with process-level examples. He identified debit card replacement as the “number one customer irritant” and a major expense, noting it happens “because somebody becomes susceptible to fraud or because a card gets damaged for a variety of reasons”. “It costs us a lot of money to send you another debit card,” he told the Jamaica Observer, citing costs for materials, distribution, and branch labour for each instance. He estimated the total cost per replacement at $8,000 to $10,000 when including record-keeping and storage. “Scale that up and you understand the magnitude of the costs,” he said, pointing to the bank’s vast portfolio of millions of cards.

Crucially, Almeida expanded the definition of cost beyond explicit losses to include inefficient “rework” — labour spent fixing internal errors that should never occur. He highlighted the manual correction of duplicate payments as a prime example, noting that while “the system runs it automated the first time,” a duplicate triggers “a lot of manual effort to reverse it”.

“A duplicate payment on a customer’s bank account… costs us a lot of money to reverse,” he stated. He framed this as a systemic drain where staff are consumed by corrective actions. “People who are doing work, but what they’re doing is they’re doing rework. They’re fixing something that has gone wrong,” he explained.

These issues are symptomatic of the deeper operational friction that erodes margins. “We are such a high volume, high intensity operation,” Almeida said, “Every time we make mistakes, it inconveniences the customer and it costs us money.” This friction is reflected in the bank’s financials. The audited statements show the group’s total staff costs reached $53.5 billion, consuming the largest share of operating expenses. Almeida’s critique suggests a significant portion of this growing wage bill is being absorbed by unproductive ‘rework’ and in “embedded” operational losses that hit the profit & loss statement.

The drive for efficiency comes even as the group reported a robust 71 per cent jump in annual net profit to $36.9 billion for the year ended September 2025. This indicates that improving the cost base is not about stemming losses, but about “executing the plans and realizing the budgets” to secure future profitability from operational excellence, as Almeida noted.

The segment most impacted by these customer-facing issues — consumer & SME banking — is NCB’s largest, contributing $46.7 billion in external revenue. Improving efficiency here, where margins are directly hit by costs like card replacements and payment corrections, would have a material impact.

Success in this overhaul, termed by Almeida as “evolutionary change” following a “disruptive” turnaround, would not only improve satisfaction but also directly boost profitability. Every dollar saved from reducing such failures “will naturally bring down cost and bring an increase, an improved customer experience”, he argued. This would directly lower the costly efficiency ratio and fund the bank’s future growth in a sustainable manner, moving it closer to its stated targets of a 15-20 per cent return on equity and a dividend payout ratio approaching 50 per cent that Almeida has repeatedly said the bank is targeting over the medium term.