Governor of the Central Bank of Barbados Dr DeLisle Worrell has disclosed that plans are under way to establish a regional regulatory system to monitor and respond to perceived weaknesses within the financial services sectors throughout the Caribbean.
He made the disclosure during the monthly meeting of the Barbados Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors (BARAIFA) on Friday at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre.
Worrell was responding to a question from insurance advisor at Sagicor Life, Colis Sealey, who asked if there was a place for a single regional financial service institution to be set up to oversee the sector, “similar to the way the Caribbean Court of Justice was established for the region”.
Noting that already there was a regional association for banking supervisors, insurance supervisors and a recent one for pension regulators, Worrell said: “All of those are to be folded into this regional arrangement such that if we have difficulties in the future of the kind that we have had in the recent past, we will first of all have reporting mechanisms which will allow us to detect the weaknesses before they reach the stage of crisis, and to put appropriate responses in place so that we increase the resilience of the system and its resistance to potential losses of the kind that we have experienced.”
Worrell also noted that the regional central banks were in the process of producing a Caribbean financial stability report.
“And the project arrangements that we are trying to set in place to support that would involve regional oversight, arrangements for coordinated regional responses to difficulties or weaknesses that are perceived in the financial system,” he said.
He did not say what stage those plans were at. (MM)
