THE JN Group has applied for a commercial banking in the Cayman Islands with the aim of converting its building society business in that island, if the application is approved.

“We are in the process of applying for a full banking licence in Cayman. We have a building society in Cayman and we have applied for Class A banking licence where we can offer more services and that’s what we are working on right now,” Earl Jarrett, co-deputy chairman and CEO of the JN Group, told the Jamaica Observer.

Jarrett told the Caribbean Business Report that if the full banking licence is not received by the end of June “the financial logic is that we will defer the project until January 2023.”

The JN Group currently pays an annual licence fee of about KY$1 million for its building society licence.

He added that the JN Group is not looking to expand physically in other islands in the Caribbean at the moment “because we have so much on our hands right now but we are keeping a watchful eye on Guyana. We have done our reconnaissance on Guyana to see whether there is need for a presence there. We also have a close eye on Antigua where there is a large Jamaican population that could benefit from our services.”

The JN Group has physical operations in Jamaica, the United States, UK, Cayman Islands and Canada. It also provides services through partners in Ghana, the Phillipines, several Caribbean countries and is also working on a partnership in India right now. Jarrett says services are also provided in Honduras through partners.

“The bank in the UK is at the development stage right now,” he added. “We are anticipating profitability out of that bank towards the end of this year or early next year.” The JN Group expects earnings from its UK bank will help to lift the performance of the JN Group.

“We are doing £2 million of lending per month in the UK and the bank was recognised as a candidate for best small British bank in the UK by the British Bankers Association.”

He added that the JN Group is working on generating new clients for a banking platform it bought recently.

“We own an international banking platform called the Phoenix banking platform that has clients all over the Caribbean and in Africa and the United States. The same platform that operates our own banking system here in Jamaica. We bought it from Finastra and it is being operated out of the MCS Group. It provides banking services to many and our goal is to expand the reach of this service in Latin America and the Caribbean and some non-Muslim African countries.” The MCS Group is a JN subsidiary. Jarrett said the service will not be offered in Muslim countries in Africa where another entity provides halal-banking services.

The Phoenix banking platform is used for several banking operations including lending, deposit taking, interfacing with tellers and customers. “It’s the underlying software that runs the bank.”

“One of the largest banks in the Caribbean, Trinidad-based Republic Bank uses the platform but they bought a separate licence for themselves, they don’t buy the service from us, but other banks in the Caribbean do use the platform.”

JN Bank is the only one in Jamaica which currently uses the Phoenix platform, but Jarrett says the services are being offered to several credit unions in the island. At least one bank in the Cayman Islands used the platform. It is also used in the British Virgin Islands and Venezuela currently use the platform among others.

Asked what’s next for the JN Group in moving forward, Jarrett replied.

“When compared to the bigger banks we are not there yet, but we’ve been doing a lot of work to organise ourselves to operate in this digital world.”

“There are many things that we do manually that can be done electronically. For instance, the decision about who gets a loan and we now have credit bureaus in Jamaica and we have data that can help to inform us about who gets a loan and what type of loan and whether someone should go through a long harduous process to get the loan or not, based on their risk. So we have been investing alot in ways to address those issues and so very shortly we’ll be coming out with a new loan adjudication system.”

“We also looking at trying to deal with these issues of KYC challenges. People have to fill out all of these forms every time they go from one place to another and what we are working on is fnding a way to get around that by having persons register just one time in the JN Group and then transport yourself across the group to access different products rather than filling out forms every entity that you deal with within the group.”

“JN is not about the next quarter its about the next quarter century, so we are building the framework for a successful organisation, not just in Jamaica, but in all the territories in which we operate,” Jarrett concluded.