Stop Waiting on Washington to Fix Our Banking Pipes

The Caribbean must build its own payments backbone and pooled compliance utilities instead of pleading with global banks to keep us connected.

For most of my career in Caribbean banking, correspondent relationships were plumbing. You never thought about the pipes until they burst. Now they are bursting, and we keep waiting for someone in Washington or London to fix them for us. That wait is the mistake.

De-risking is not a rumor. When global banks decided that small Caribbean markets were more compliance trouble than they were worth, they simply withdrew. The Caribbean Association of Banks found in a 2017 survey that twenty-one of its twenty-three member banks had lost at least one correspondent banking relationship. Between 2011 and 2020, Belize, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Dominica, The Bahamas and Jamaica each saw such relationships fall by more than forty percent. These are the wires that let a hotel accept a foreign card, a diaspora nurse send money home, a distributor pay for imported medicine.

The human stakes are not abstract. In Jamaica, remittances are worth roughly a fifth of national output, and every severed relationship pushes those flows toward fewer, costlier channels, or underground entirely. Concentration is its own danger. When a whole economy routes its dollars through one or two remaining counterparties, the withdrawal of a single bank stops being an inconvenience and becomes a national emergency.

The habit we must break

Our reflex has been to plead. Prime Minister Mia Mottley took the case to the United States Congress in 2022, and she was right to. But diplomacy that asks large banks to be more patient with us is, by design, a posture of dependence. It treats our access to the financial system as a favor to be renewed rather than infrastructure we control. A region that earns its own foreign exchange should not have to petition for the right to move it.

The alternative is finally taking shape. Caribbean central banks have adopted the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System model, and are building the CARICOM Payment and Settlement System, or CAPSS, with technical support from Afreximbank. In February 2025 the central banks of Barbados and The Bahamas completed a successful pilot, settling cross-border transactions in local currency. As Barbados Governor Kevin Greenidge put it, when trade clears regionally you need fewer United States dollars for daily activity, freeing scarce hard currency for the things only dollars can buy.

What we actually control

CAPSS is the settlement backbone. The other half of the answer is compliance. De-risking happened partly because our small banks could not individually satisfy the anti money laundering expectations of correspondents many times their size. So pool the function. A shared regional compliance utility, screening transactions and maintaining common standards across jurisdictions, would give a global bank one credible counterparty to trust instead of a dozen it cannot afford to vet. We should fund it together and staff it with our own expertise.

I want to be fair to the doubters. Regional cooperation in the Caribbean has a long record of promising and stalling, and sovereignty over payments is politically delicate. A regional system cannot yet clear a dollar in New York, so correspondent relationships will remain necessary for some time. Building shared infrastructure is expensive for economies already stretched thin. These are reasons to design carefully, not reasons to do nothing.

Because the deeper risk is passivity. If we treat de-risking as weather, something that happens to us, we will keep losing pipes one by one until the room floods. If we treat it as architecture, something we can build, we change the terms. The Caribbean will not secure its place in global finance by being a more agreeable customer. We secure it by owning infrastructure that makes us worth connecting to.