THE Jamaica National Group Limited (JN Group) has been put under additional pressure as its money services business in the United Kingdom (UK) faces new hurdles due to challenges in accessing commercial banking services.

This was the update provided by JN Group CEO Earl Jarrett at the eighth annual general meeting (AGM) held last Tuesday. According to his report, which was included in the 2025 annual report, JN Money Services (UK) Limited has struggled in recent times to secure banking services, which has resulted in it only doing transactions via credit or debit cards. That has impacted the profitability of the UK outfit as other competitors move forward without these challenges to process cash payments.

“The company can now only do transactions which are settled by way of credit or debit cards. As you know, many Jamaicans are cash-oriented, and this has resulted in a significant reduction in our remittance business in the United Kingdom. Ironically, our international competitors are able to access commercial banking services which has placed us at a distinct disadvantage,” Jarrett explained.

While it was recently reported that the JN Money App was being piloted in the UK, challenges in that market reinforce the concerns surrounding correspondent banking services which is the gateway for Caribbean banks to interact with the global financial system. JN Group recently reduced its exposure to JN Bank (UK) Limited, now This Bank Limited, from 100 per cent to 6.37 per cent due to the pressures of operating in that market.

Correspondent banking services involves a relationship with another bank for certain services like cash handling and settlement processes for hard currencies like the United States dollar (USD), Canadian dollar (CAD) and British Pound (GBP) in the respective domestic markets. An example is with The Bank of Nova Scotia (Scotiabank) which offers correspondent banking services in Canada.

“Some years ago, Mrs Natalie Haynes from the BOJ made reference to the fact that our correspondent banking issue is a serious one and that, in fact, Jamaica is relying on a single string of correspondent banking services from Citibank to keep us going,” Jarrett lamented in his presentation.

He added, “I must tell you that having gone through the experience of setting up this bank in the UK, which was set up principally to deal with that challenge, I’m a little disappointed that the governments in the Caribbean have not been able to tackle this as a serious issue.”

This situation is compounded by the recent remittance tax introduced in the United States of America (USA), which is a one per cent excise tax on international money transfers done using cash or money orders. The new tax, along with higher immigration enforcement by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been a challenge for immigrants trying to send remittances back to their family members.

However, the JN Group executive remains positive about its money services business, which it estimated to control a 16 per cent market share in Jamaica, and improved its profitability by eight per cent to $242.1 million in the March 2025 financial year. It recently expanded to Rhode Island, North Carolina, and South Carolina in the USA while branching out to Ghana, Gambia, Nepal, and Kenya.

JN Group invests $3 billion in technology to improve processes

The JN Group has spent over $3 billion over the past five years to improve the delivery of products and services to its clients. The recent project rubicon implementation at JN Bank has reduced the adjudication time for unsecured loans from 16 days to eight days as the system pulls information from internal and external data sources to improve credit adjudication. Jarrett also noted that high-level data analysis has been implemented to make the credit models more predictive on the risk of a loan loss.

“The Project Rubicon is now being prepared to process all loans, including mortgage loans. This approach has been approved by our regulators and is a major fillip for the bank. It also compliments our process of upgrading our risk management framework to reduce loan losses,” said Jarrett in his presentation.

JN Bank has received approval from the BOJ to expand this system to all of its loans as it seeks to speed up the delivery of services. This data lead approach is being complemented using Salesforce and Queuerite to improve customer interactions and traffic flow in branches.

The One JN Passport app which was launched in November 2023 has resulted in half of new customer accounts being opened online while allowing for customers to access credit cards, unsecured loans, and short-term fixed deposits. JN Bank also launched the JN Pay mobile app to enable the use of Jam-Dex and a new mobile version of JN Live in 2025. The JN MyCard app is currently in development, but it is meant to support card management for the JN Bank Visa debit card which should be sent to clients in 2026. JN Bank also deployed the JN Pay point of sale (POS) merchant services to better enable business customers to handle digital payments.