THE Bank of Jamaica (BOJ) has cleared Barita Merchant Bank to begin rolling out a digital-first banking platform, moving Cornerstone Financial Holdings from more than a decade of acquisitions and regulatory build-out into the harder test of winning customers in Jamaica’s crowded digital finance market.

The first customer-facing features will be a digital wallet and companion Visa card, but Cornerstone has not disclosed a launch date, customer targets, transaction-volume goals or adoption benchmarks, leaving unclear how quickly it expects the platform to gain traction with customers.

For years, the group’s expansion appeared to follow a familiar pattern: acquiring a banking platform, transforming Barita Investments into Jamaica’s largest securities dealer by shareholders’ equity, expanding into investment banking and wealth management, acquiring JN Fund Managers, renamed Barita Fund Managers, and securing approval to operate as a financial holding company.

Founder and Group CEO Paul Simpson says those transactions were never intended to stand alone.

“From the outset, we were a technology company that owned a bank; and not the other way around,” Simpson told the Jamaica Observer in emailed responses about the non-objection from the BOJ to roll-out digital products.

Stefano D’Ambrosio, who helped develop Latin America’s first mobile banking platform, is part of the team behind Cornerstone’s digital banking initiative.

For most of the past decade, Cornerstone’s public identity has been tied to securities trading, investment management and merchant banking rather than technology. According to Simpson, the bank itself was never the destination.

“The vision was never limited to owning or operating a traditional banking institution. We viewed the banking platform as a foundational component of a much broader strategy aimed at building a digitally-enabled integrated financial services ecosystem,” he said.

In Simpson’s telling, the acquisitions were not isolated transactions but steps in building a broader financial-services platform around the bank.

The technology focus is also reflected in some of the executives recruited to help build the platform. Among them is Stefano D’Ambrosio, whom Cornerstone credits with helping to develop Latin America’s first mobile banking platform, and Chirag Mehta, a technology executive whose experience includes senior roles at Amazon and Adobe. Their recruitment reflected the company’s effort to add technology expertise alongside its banking and investment capabilities.

The strategy attracted support from the United States’ Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), which approved funding for the initiative. Simpson said the company applied to the BOJ in early 2014 to acquire the banking platform as part of a plan to use technology to drive financial inclusion. The approval process took longer than anticipated, and the OPIC funding commitment expired in July 2016 before the acquisition could be completed. Cornerstone only assumed ownership of the bank in December of that year.

The delay also disrupted the proposed ecosystem and forced the company to arrange alternative financing.

SIMPSON….from the outset, we were a technology company that owned a bank; and not the other way around.

“It is a good thing we did, because that decision ultimately saved the transaction,” Simpson told the Business Observer. “The approved OPIC funding, though fully committed, was never drawn down, but the vision was never abandoned,” he continued.

Now, after more than a decade of acquisitions, regulatory approvals and technology investment, the first feature customers will encounter is a wallet.

The company describes the initiative as a digital-first bank designed to support a broader range of services, including savings, loans, payments, remittances, investing and other financial products, allowing customers to move from basic transactions into deeper banking relationships without visiting a branch.

The wallet is intended to serve as an entry point into a broader suite of banking, investment and wealth-management services.

That strategy now enters a more difficult phase. Cornerstone is moving into a market where banks, credit unions and fintech operators have spent years expanding digital channels, payment solutions and mobile services. The company’s bet is that the market is still not fully served.

Its challenge will be persuading customers to adopt a new digital banking platform in a market where many financial institutions already offer mobile apps, cards, transfers and payment services.

“There are still many Jamaicans who remain outside of the formal financial system, many who are underserved, and many who continue to experience friction when accessing financial services,” the company noted.

Rather than focusing on a single customer group, the company said it expects the platform to appeal to both existing Barita clients and customers who remain underserved by traditional financial institutions, including members of the diaspora.

Simpson said the ambition now extends beyond Jamaica to the wider Caribbean and Latin America, markets facing many of the same challenges involving financial inclusion, payments efficiency and economic connectivity. The regional push is already under way, with the group establishing operations in Barbados and expanding its presence in other markets as it seeks to build a broader financial-services platform.

One thing the company is not yet prepared to disclose is how success will be measured. Asked about customer-acquisition, transaction-volume, asset-growth and adoption targets over the next three to five years, Cornerstone declined to provide specific figures.

That leaves the platform entering the market with regulatory approval, a banking licence, a securities platform, an asset-management arm and a broader financial-holding-company structure — the culmination of more than a decade of acquisitions, investment and platform-building. The next test is whether that foundation can translate into customer adoption.

Paul Simpson, founder and group CEO of Cornerstone Financial Holdings, with former Minister of Finance Dr Peter Phillips and Duncan Stewart, now chairman of Barita Financial Group, at the 2014 New York Stock Exchange launch of the fintech initiative behind Barita Merchant Bank’s new platform.