How banks are reaching out to the 'unbankable'

Strange things these pandemics. I am not entirely convinced any more that they are caused by human wilfulness or outright greed or just plain evil. I don’t believe in co-incidence.

Like Shakespeare I am starting to believe there is a larger plan directing it all. What was it he said? There is a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them as we will? John Neal said something like: Strong people are made by opposition, like kites that go up against the wind.

This is one of those pandemics that change the world. It already has. And will continue to do so.

As Tennyson noted: “The old order changeth, yielding place to new,/And God fulfils Himself in many ways,/Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.” (Since a great many bad ones already have).

I do not believe this is all happening by accident. There are too many things: global warming, religious and philosophic redirections, political upheavals, whole populations, cultures, languages and traditions moving en mass from region to region simultaneously.

And it is happening right here, right now, in TT as it is throughout civilisation, as it has through other pandemics, helped along faster this time than ever before in history, by globalisation and technology.

Every month the Caribbean Centre for Human Rights in Port of Spain, partnering with Dialogue Solutions, hosts a free online lunch panel on various vital life-changing human rights ideas, facts and opinions. Serious people like the DPP, heads of Caribbean prisons, trade unions, law firms, corporations, NGOs, students, come onto the panel exploring issues they consider seminal.

It is expertly chaired by inimitable journalist Andy Johnson, as panellists discuss immigration, jail conditions, abuse of the law or the law’s abuse of people. Anyone can join in. It is free, streamed live all over the Commonwealth.

This month it dealt with an aspect of business I never expected to hear in public in TT. It had to do with banking and its link to human rights. I don’t mean to be rude, but I didn’t know there was one, and I thought most banks didn’t either. You know, what we learned at school: Scrooge and Marley, the poor house, Little Dorrit, debtor’s prison, Charles Dickens and all that?

It turns out that I just may not have been keeping up with the intellectual and cultural changes that are sweeping the world, spurred on by the UN's 17 development goals. I knew that our government had signed on to them (I looked them up; they are all on Google) but, cynic that I am, I thought that would be it: Sign. Smile for the cameras. Go back to “same as usual.”

But, to my astonishment, there was a very senior Caribbean banker, in a calm and thoughtful manner, speaking about how at least one local bank is moving to implement these goals.

A bank?

Andy referred to him as having courage and strength of character. Which he had, as well as ethics and professionalism, not speaking over our heads in bankers’ language which no one understands. He was backed by two extremely senior and highly knowledgeable lawyers responding to a very articulate representative of the dispossessed and currently “unbankable” public.

Phone calls and e-mails started coming in from listeners in Toronto, from Jamaica, from Belize, from Washington. Well, this livestreaming thing apparently spreads human-rights issues faster than the Omicron virus.

People hitherto excluded from the benefits of banking, which we all thought were only there for the moneyed elite, we were told, will now be eligible to set up their own accounts. Small entrepreneurs, battered and abused women escaping violent homes with only the clothes on their backs and their children in their arms, people unable to present utility bills because they rent, not own, where they live, immigrants with only UNHCR registration cards as proof of identification – are about to be considered eligible to have bank accounts without strangling in bureaucracy.

Well, I exaggerate, of course. At least one bank is moving down that road. Republic Bank Ltd (RBL) has revised its process for basic banking accounts. Requirements such as two forms of ID, proof of address and a job letter have traditionally been barriers to opening accounts.

A person can now obtain a bank account with simply one valid form of ID, must indicate to the bank the address where they live, if they can’t demonstrate proof of address, and also state how the account is to be funded, if a job letter/source of income can’t be shown.

“These are all attempts to simplify the account-opening procedure and ensure that the unbanked and the underbanked are considered for financial inclusion” said Richard Sammy, general manager, corporate and investment banking, from Republic Bank.

That this will change people’s lives from pauper status to a decent living, one of the UN's 17 sustainable goals, is more than just possible.

I remember 25 years ago sitting with five young people listening to Anthony Sabga, then one of, if not the wealthiest man in TT, telling the audience how, when he started out from utter poverty, he had gone bankrupt nine times before he became a financial success.

When asked how he had done it, he said it was because he had been supported and trusted by his bankers. He is dead now, but coming from impoverishment to wealth, his influence has changed people’s lives all over the Caribbean through the foundation that carries his name. Still supported by the same bank.

Trust does not “fall like the rain from heaven upon the place beneath.” You have to work hard to earn it, which he did, and through the trust he earned, through that entrepreneurship, which the economists tell us is what an economy is based on, he benefited not just his family or his community, but the entire Caribbean.

If all our banks catch on to how their future prospects will benefit by helping promote the human rights of ordinary people like the new versions of Anthony Sabga, our future will improve as well.

Shauna Traynor, a family business consultant from Canada, told a PMSL/Dialogue Solutions discussion last year that some 70 per cent of corporations in Canada started as family firms.

In the US, family businesses account for 64 per cent of GDP, generate 62 per cent of the country's employment, and account for 78 per cent of all new job creation. They all started as small entrepreneurs with bank support.

If they can do it, so can we.