Reading Time: 4 minutes

With its sights set on organic and inorganic growth for 2026, microfinancier Dolla Financial Services is tightening its loan disbursement mechanism and improving fraud detection.

Dolla Financial Services CEO Kenroy Kerr outlined some of the company’s strategic objectives in an online interview on Mayberry Investments Limited (MIL) – Virtual Investor Briefing, led by MIL Senior Vice-President Dan Theoc.

“We have raised some additional funding for 2026 and, obviously, a good portion of that will be channelled into growing the loan portfolio,” Kerr said. “So, during 2026…we will be even more strategic and disciplined in how we grow the portfolio.

“So rather than raising a billion dollars and lending it out in three months, we will just be tightening how we manage the cash that we have and get that steady incremental increase in the revenue on a quarterly basis. So that $200-million goal of profit before tax, we should be hitting that for sure during 2026, but most likely we’ll be seeing that in the latter part of 2026.”

The microlender returned net profits before tax for the period October-December 2025 of $142.30 million—up 27.6 per cent when compared to the same period in 2024. At the same time, total revenues for the 2025 fourth quarter increased to $452.08 million, up from $317.43 million.

For 2025, the company generated total revenues of $1.51 billion, an increase of 34.8 per cent over $1.12 billion. Consequently, net profits rose to $582.13 million or by 21.7 per cent.

Driving this growth, Kerr shared, was new loan originations from small and medium-sized enterprises, the company’s core business segment.

“Particularly, we saw a lot of credit being issued to repeat borrowers and those with established repayment histories with Dolla, and then we also continue to see some strong demand from small and other medium-sized entities,” he said.

“We also saw where a lot of the growth, in terms of sector, would have come from the transportation sector. So, [in] the haulage transportation and public passenger vehicle sectors, we saw some strong loan originations there,” Kerr added.

A significant portion of Dolla Financial’s loan portfolio, approximately 90 per cent are secured facilities backed by collateral.

“That’s a key pillar of how we maintain the quality of the loan book, and it really underpins our risk adjustment: the risk that we take as we grow the portfolio,” the Dolla Financial CEO explained.

Managing non-performing loans

In 2025, Dolla Financial’s non-performing loans increased to 13 per cent, up from 10 per cent in 2024. Kerr pointed out that the company is now in the process of liquidating those bad debts.

“Of course, in this market, liquidating a property sometimes can take three months, but other times, we’re looking at nine months, 12 months, especially if you have a cancellation here and there. And we were successful with quite a few liquidations during 2025, but there are still some significant loans that we’re in the process of liquidating, and we should be seeing some amount of relief during 2026,” he said.

Some of those non-performing loans emerged in the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa, which made landfall on Tuesday, October 28, 2025. As a result, the company implemented relief programmes, including moratoria for its borrowers.

In terms of expected credit losses, the company has engaged a third party to assess the potential of loans that will go into default based on a number of variables, including macroeconomic conditions.

Combatting fraud

When asked if Dolla Financial has experienced the impact of fraud across Jamaica’s financial system, Kerr conceded that it did not have an impact on the loan portfolio, but more so on expenses.

“So the fraud cases really involve falsified and improperly registered security documentation,” he noted.

“For us, the activities are very similar in terms of the properties, the titles, the fraudulent identities, and it goes beyond even touching on motor vehicles, where we would have financed a few, maybe about 11 vehicles, where our interests would have been noted and registered on those. And at the end of the day, we realised that these registrations were actually fraudulent,” he further revealed.

Dolla has, as a result, forged deeper ties with the National Land Agency to independently verify titles. It has also engaged with Tax Administration Jamaica to verify ownership of motor vehicles and ensure there are no liens on them.

“We do not do disbursements until we have gotten that verification and our interest registered. Just how we deal with issues of dual registration. We have put in place enhanced checklists when it comes to the security documents that we do, centralising some security documentation, tracking, and just having title oversight of the whole legal framework when it comes to the motor vehicle and the property security loans that we do,” Kerr shared.

“And of course, there is an issue too of fraudulent identities. And we have implemented systems that obviously will do verification of IDs and put in place additional controls with how we treat with the customer, whether they need to be present in our branch and all of those things. So there are so many things that we have tightened in terms of control that we’re confident that we should not be seeing a repeat of these activities,” he added.

While this added due diligence process has further delayed the approval loans, Kerr highlighted that loan applicants can still receive disbursements in 48 hours after submitting all the required documents.

“Dolla deals with higher risk customers than a typical traditional bank would do, and that is why when we do disburse a loan and we have done all of our due diligence, we take the extra step to ensure that the loan is secured and there is something that we can get back in the event of a default,” he disclosed.