Curtis Martin, chief financial officer for Jamaica National Group, will take over as the new managing director of JN Bank Limited in one week, replacing Maureen Hayden-Cater who departs the bank on November 30.
Martin, who once ran Jamaica’s largest merchant banking outfit prior to its sale five years ago, already has his eye on opportunities to drum up business for JN in its overseas markets.
“The overseas expansion does not involve acquisition, but repurposing our overseas banking licences to be more efficient catchment vehicles for deposit acquisitions,” he told the Financial Gleaner this week.
JN Group has representative offices in the United States, United Kingdom and the Cayman Islands, but its membership base is spread much wider across 48 countries.
JN’s deposit base includes $23 billion of savings from diaspora markets, Martin said at JN Group’s annual general meeting last week. The group would be looking to invest in entities overseas, he said, citing anaemic growth in its main market, Jamaica.
Hayden-Cater ran JN Bank for nine months, since the institution’s formal transition from a building society to a commercial bank in February of this year. She initially joined the building society in October 2015 as it was restructuring for the transition to banking, and before that was president of another commercial bank, First Global, which is owned by the GraceKennedy conglomerate.
Martin, who joined JNBS in July 2013 as assistant general manager for treasury and investments, has a background in banking, corporate finance and investment management. He previously headed Capital & Credit Merchant Bank, which was acquired by JMMB Group IN 2012 and transformed to a commercial banking operation this year, called JMMB Bank.
JN Bank is the third largest of eight commercial banks with assets of $161 billion and a deposit base of $112 billion. The bank made net profit of $479 million earned on revenue of $9.1 billion in its last financial year.
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