Off The Lists, Not Off The Hook On Correspondent Banking

The region has cleared FATF and EU watchlists, but the correspondent banking squeeze that de-risking set in motion has not eased.

A quiet run of delistings

The last two years handed the Caribbean a rare sequence of good news on financial reputation. On February 23, 2024, the Financial Action Task Force removed Barbados from its list of jurisdictions under increased monitoring, the so-called grey list, following an on-site assessment earlier that month. Jamaica followed at the FATF plenary of June 26 to 28, 2024, ending a listing that had run since 2020. Both governments cast the exits as proof that costly reform programs had worked.

Brussels moves in step

The European Union then aligned its own regime. On June 10, 2025, the European Commission published a revised list of high-risk third countries for money laundering and terrorist financing that delisted Barbados, Jamaica and Panama, alongside Gibraltar, the United Arab Emirates and others. For Bridgetown and Kingston, that closed a painful loop: EU and United Kingdom blacklisting had followed directly from the FATF listings, and delisting reversed the chain.

Haiti stays under watch

The regional picture is not uniform. Haiti remains under FATF increased monitoring, one of the few Caribbean states still identified for strategic deficiencies. At its October 24, 2025 plenary the FATF removed Burkina Faso, Mozambique, Nigeria and South Africa and added no new jurisdictions, leaving only the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Iran and Myanmar on the highest-risk call-for-action list. The Caribbean is no longer a headline concern for the standard-setters, but the reputational scar tissue remains.

The deeper problem outlasts the lists

Delisting does not restore what de-risking took away. The core grievance across CARICOM is the retreat of global banks from correspondent relationships, the account links that let local banks clear US dollars and process cross-border payments. The International Monetary Fund has documented the Caribbean as among the regions hardest hit by this withdrawal, with small economies losing the very connections that trade, remittances and tourism depend on. Where relationships survived, they often came with higher fees and heavier compliance demands that erode already thin banking margins.

A region making its own case

The policy response has been to organize rather than wait. De-risking has stayed high on the agenda of the Caribbean Financial Action Task Force, the regional FATF-style body, which continues to press that wholesale exit from the region is disproportionate to actual risk. The Caribbean Development Bank has funded work aimed at preventing further loss of correspondent banking relationships, and CARICOM heads have repeatedly carried the argument to Washington and Brussels that de-risking treats compliant institutions as collateral damage. The framing regional leaders now favor is blunt: correspondent banking access should be treated as something close to a public good, not a discretionary commercial choice.

What the wins are worth

The delistings matter because they remove an excuse. A global bank can no longer point to a FATF or EU listing to justify cutting a Barbadian or Jamaican counterpart loose. But they do not compel any bank to open or keep an account, and that gap is where the region's exposure still lives. The unfinished work is turning hard-won clean status into durable access, so that clearing a watchlist buys more than a press release.