Paula Lindo
Photo courtesy FCB –
First Citizens Bank (FCB) CEO Karen Darbasie said the bank is encouraging people to switch to alternate modes of banking, but it thinks it’s important to keep the human touch.
“Our vision for where we go to next is to couple the best of technology with the warmth of human interaction. We’re one of the few banks that’s still opening new premises, in Milford Road, Tobago, and a much bigger operation in Diego Martin. There’s a new branch coming to Sangre Grande, where we’ll be relocating to newer, bigger premises and there are plans for a new south hub. We’re trying to combine both, encourage use of the alternate channels and maintain the branch accessibility.”
Darbasie said the bank had spent a lot on creating tutorials as part of their advertising on how to do online banking and resetting personal identification numbers online, as well as other transactions.
The bank is celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2023. FCB was formed in 1993 after the merger of three banks – the Trinidad Co-operative Bank (the Penny Bank), the National Commercial Bank, and the Worker’s Bank.
Customer service
Darbasie said the bank was moving more services online to become more efficient. She said some of the services available included the artificial intelligence chat bot Annie, telebanking, being able to print statements online, and more self-service options. She said they were seeing more people make the change.
Darbasie said different demographics choose to engage with the bank in different ways. She said the bank had conducted research about the demographics and how to fill their needs, offering products and services based on this research. She said FCB was trying to adopt a holistic, hybrid approach that speaks to who it is and where it’s come from.
She said the demographics included Boomers (1946-1964), Gen X (1965-1980), millennials (1981-1986) and Gen Z (1997-2012.)
Darbasie said she knew people had been complaining about long wait times on calls. She said the bank had boosted its call centre, as its call volumes increased phenomenally from 2022 to 2023.
“We hired a whole batch of new staff that were deployed in the call centre over the last month. They’re coming up a learning curve of course. I am monitoring our call wait time on a weekly basis by type of query, by day, by week, and getting weekly reports, and we’re seeing the evidence that the wait time is coming down. We’re monitoring it to see what else we need to do to make it more accessible.
“We’re also monitoring social media to see if complaints are decreasing. The wait time also depends on the time of the week or month that people are calling, and we have to understand the trends are to know how many resources are needed and what they need to be trained in. We’re also trying to encourage people to use more of the self-service options because some of the things they call for, they can do themselves.”
Difficulty in opening accounts
One often-heard complaint is the difficulty in opening accounts, especially for self-employed people. She said sometimes the regulations the banks had to follow could be tedious for customers, as the institutions were highly regulated.
Darbasie said for this reason, a simplified due diligence account called the Simple Save Account was created in 2021 based on guidelines for smaller volume transactions issued by the Central Bank.
“Once the cash in and out was below a certain limit on a monthly basis, there was a reduced amount of due diligence. You still need a form of ID and to provide some evidence you live where you say you live. The bank then has to do additional monitoring to ensure the accounts are following the parameters set by the Central Bank and make up for the lessened due diligence in opening the account.”
She said the initial uptake by customers was initially good and the bank would welcome more customers coming in to open these accounts. She said people could make and get payments easily, have access to a bank card, be able to reset pins online, and employers could direct deposit to the account.
Another issue she addressed was the difficulty in opening different types of accounts within the same banking group, with customers being asked to bring in duplicate documents. She said the documents have to be current, including utility bills which should not be older than 90 days.
She said another obstacle to the ease of opening an account was that while customers may see one group, there are different legal entities in the group.
“For example, your brokerage account is with an entity called First Citizens Investment Services Ltd, which is a subsidiary of the bank but it’s not the bank, and the bank is not allowed by law to share information from one entity to another, even if they’re part of the same group. So that’s why customers may come to open a mutual fund account, mutual funds are done under First Citizens Investment Funds, previously First Citizens Asset Management, which is a different entity, even though you’re moving money from the savings account to the mutual fund, because the mutual fund is a separate legal entity, the bank can’t share your customer information.”
She said sharing of information required customer consent, which was not part of the forms used to open accounts previously. She said this was a legal restriction which the bank was working through.
Foreign exchange
She said banks understand the cries of their customers when it comes to not being able to access foreign exchange. She said banks can’t sell what they don’t buy.
“The July 2023 Central Bank quarterly economic bulletin shows the amount by year that banks bought from the public and sold to the public. What we’re buying is not what we have to sell, and the shortfall comes in from the Central Bank. In 2022 and so far in 2023, the amount the banks were able to get from the Central Bank fell short of what was needed to supply customers.
“It’s a struggle, because we are depending on the Central Bank injection, but the bank also has to look at the country’s reserves. The reserves are the country’s savings so they can’t just give it out in one go. It’s a balancing act. We try to satisfy as many customers as possible at FCB, which means they get their needs satisfied over time as opposed to when they come. I know people think banks have the money but we’re literally selling more than we’re buying, which is a problem.”
Darbasie noted that banks can’t control what people spend on their credit cards, and explained a statement by the Finance Minister in a release on September 23 that “the sales by all banks of foreign exchange using credit cards in TT (overseas transactions) had in fact reached close to US$6 million a day in September 2023.”
She said, “The banks sold US$3.6 billion up to July 2023, and 37.2 per cent of that went to credit cards up to July, that’s US$1.37 billion, and if you extrapolate that to the year, it means credit cards would have used US$2.4 billion, and if you divide it by 365, that’s US$6 million a day in credit cards.”
Darbasie said she thought a lot of the spending is by SMEs and sole traders using their credit cards.
“That’s why I think the minister’s statement at looking at a specific amount of foreign exchange and having discussions around how that could be made available to the SMEs could help the situation. The banks will contribute to the discussion to ensure the clients’ needs are represented, but we welcome the initiative on the SME sector.”
Small and medium enterprises
Darbasie said in 2022 the government had relaunched a programme specifically for SMEs which was different from the one put in place during covid19.
“The new programme facilitated more productive loans for investment in equipment, etc., and we are part of that programme, which is specifically targeted to SMEs and benefits from lower interest rates.
“We have a lot of sole traders which are entities that might not quite be incorporated as legal entities but are run under a sole trader kind of registration and we handle that business on an ongoing basis through our branch network.”
During the 2024 budget, the Finance Minister said government would create new arrangements for preferential access to foreign exchange for qualified small and medium enterprises. He said he had received recommendations from the TT Chamber of Industry and Commerce, the commercial banks and the EximBank, and expected to be able to implement this new SME forex facility within the next six months, which should reduce the demand for sales of foreign exchange using credit cards.
Darbasie said he was looking forward to discussions with the banks to really look at how that can be done and put in place.
Cybersecurity and physical security
Darbasie acknowledged that many people were concerned about keeping their data and money safe. She said FCB has five layers of protection when it comes to cybersecurity.
“We have internal resources that are continuously monitoring our systems to ensure there is no unauthorised access. We also have international resources that monitor our systems on an ongoing basis, and then we do a third level of security, which is to bring on someone on a check and balance process to check the checker almost. On a regular basis we bring in international consultants to review our cyber front, to look at what we’re doing and to give us advice as to what could be done differently and better.”
She said the Central Bank has guidelines for cyberspace, and the bank does a gap analysis around the guidelines and retrofits its processes to fit these. She said cyber was a key priority and FCB took the responsibility of protecting customer data very seriously.
Crime and bank robberies
Darbasie said FCB has stepped up security in its car parks since the recent spate of robberies of people leaving banks with large amounts of cash, as well as additional security to discourage lurkers in the bank.
“We have no evidence that employees are involved in tipping off criminals or anything like that. We have a very rigorous process to onboard our employees, including all the checks you could imagine, and references. We continue to monitor the situation and we want to ensure our customers are as safe as possible.”
Cashless systems/society
Darbasie said Trinidad still uses a lot of cash. She said some people are more willing to use online systems and debit cards, while others are still transitioning. She said banks were trying to encourage less use of cash, as there are disadvantages and costs to using cash, including security for customers and merchants.”
She said the push for less cash use has to be adopted by customers as well. She said FCB was educating people while they were standing in line at the branches by staff members using roving tablets on how to do transactions at home. She said she hoped TT would transition to a less cash intensive society over time.
She said being able to pay for taxis with a debit/credit card, which is an option in some countries, is already available, as it would use a mobile point of sale (POS) machine. She said the bank was working on the next generation of mobile POSs, moving from a physical device to a virtual POS accessed via an app.
Darbasie said another option being worked on was being able to deposit cheques via a photograph. She said banks began electronic cheque clearing using images in March.
“We’re hopeful the testing period will be done soon, and we can work to morph it for the front office. Electronic clearing had to be adopted by all banks simultaneously for it to work. Part of that was standardising the formatting of all cheques across the banks so the electronic scanning system could know that this part of the image would contain a certain type of information. That also meant customers had to change out their chequebooks, which took a while.”
She said the banks didn’t want people to use cheques anymore, preferring them to pay electronically. She said there was also an environmental concern in producing cash and using paper for bank transactions, which is why some transactions and document packages could now be reviewed online.
Credit cards
Darbasie said the glitch with the credit cards used at PriceSmart was an issue with the bank that processes the payments, and not a cyber issue. She said all banks were impacted as they all had cards used at the merchants involved in this particular instance.
She said the issue originated with the processing bank, and FCB was able to get the data within two days of the issue being reported. She said once the files were received, FCB was able to go through the specific files to see which customers were impacted.
“We are doing a reconciliation with the intention of remediating the clients’ credit cards as soon as possible, and we’re doing the reconciliation properly because we don’t want to have a knee-jerk reaction that negatively affects the customer. We hope to be able to do this very soon for FCB’s customers and we’ll continue to communicate with customers via our website.”
Looking forward
Darbasie said a recent accomplishment they were proud of was being featured in Banker’s Magazine.
“We were named number one for soundness in Latin America and number four overall bank in Latin America, rankings that were done independently based on public information but something we were quite proud of. They didn’t tell us, it was just published. It was meaningful for us.”
Darbasie said the bank is the only indigenous bank, the only one that did not come into the country as a foreign entity, and is still fairly young compared to its peers.
“At the 30th anniversary, I stepped back and asked what does that mean? At the staffing convention, our theme was Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. It’s always good when you reach milestones to look back at what you’ve done, acknowledge where you are today, and look at where you’re going forward.
“We’re a wholly-grown Caribbean entity, all our staff are local staff in the communities in which we operate. We think we are performing credibly, over the 30 years we moved from fourth largest to fifth largest financial services group by probably second by balance sheet size. It’s something we’re proud of, that it’s been built locally. All the stakeholders should be proud of that.”
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