Barbados' First Fully Digital Bank Gains Market Share and Customer Base Rapidly in First Year, CEO Reports

The island’s first fully digital bank has copped about “ten per cent of the addressable market”, adding more than 1 000 customers a month in its first year, its head has said.

Chief Executive Officer of Sagicor Bank (Barbados) Limited George Thomas declared the bank is doing “really, really well” as it targets unbanked citizens.

“Barbados only has 237 000 persons of which 150 000, 160 000 or so of them are banked. The rest are children. I don’t think anyone’s grown that as quickly as we have. I stand corrected, but I know for sure we’re the only digital bank here in Barbados and in the English-speaking Caribbean. We’ve done a lot of firsts,” he told a group of 27 graduate business students visiting from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. “Barbados is interesting in that it does not have a large unbanked community. There may be people . . . that don’t use banking services as much as they can. What we have done is we have made it easy for anyone who wants to open a bank account, unless regulation prohibits it, and there are a bunch of categories there to open a bank account with us. It is relatively easy . . . . Some persons have opened bank accounts in five minutes . . . and we have a graduated approach to onboarding, so it allows them for young people, for entrepreneurs. We may limit the transactions that you can do until you’ve built up a track record.”

Thomas added that Sagicor also caters to “younger persons and self-employed persons, those who are forever self-employed, don’t have a track record and that prohibited them, in the past, from getting into the banking system”.

Established over nine months by a team of 45, Sagicor Bank runs its business entirely on cloud computing, the bank executive told the students.

“We don’t own a data centre. What that does is it allows us to scale rapidly – scale down, scale up – as we decide to follow the Sagicor footprint, because [Sagicor] stretches from Curacao all the way up to Toronto. As we follow the footprint to the region, . . . everything can be here. Scaling is not a challenge. It’ll be [the] regulatory [challenges] and adapting to the different ways of the different markets, but from a tech perspective, from an operations perspective, we have it all here,” Thomas said.

“Hopefully, this will be the beginning of a great interchange, maybe through internships, maybe through research and so on, because we are breaking new ground from a business perspective. . . . Digital banks are typically in countries that have tens of millions. How do you make it profitable in a country that’s so small? It’s not just giving away stuff and throwing stuff at the wall and then it sticks. You have to be very mindful.”

(RG)