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Prepared for Our Today | Capital Markets & Investments Desk May 14 2026 / David Welsh

Behind the headline earnings rebound lies a Sagicor investment compounding quietly into a structural earnings engine, a four-country regional platform running at full capacity, and a capital markets unit positioning itself to help finance the rebuilding of a nation after Hurricane Melissa’s historic devastation.

There are moments in financial markets when a single earnings report says far more about the future of an economy than the company itself. JMMB Group’s announcement of a 138% surge in net profit for the nine months ending December 31, 2024 is precisely that kind of moment. Net profit climbed to J$4.36 billion from J$1.84 billion in the prior year period. Earnings per stock unit rose to J$2.11 from J$0.84. Net operating revenue increased 23% to J$22.39 billion. On the surface, these are the numbers of a company staging a powerful recovery. Beneath them is something considerably more consequential.

This is the story of a financial institution that was punished by a global interest rate cycle it could not control, survived the pressure through disciplined diversification, and is now positioning itself at the intersection of capital markets, regional finance, and the largest infrastructure rebuilding programme Jamaica has seen in a generation. To understand where JMMB is going, you first have to understand what it endured to get here.

Recovery Fueled by Lower Rates

When the United States Federal Reserve launched its most aggressive rate-hiking campaign since the 1980s in response to post-pandemic inflation, financial institutions with deep exposure to capital markets and fixed-income portfolios absorbed the shock acutely. JMMB, whose diversified model spans banking, securities trading, wealth management and regional financial services, was precisely that kind of institution. Bond prices declined. Investment portfolio valuations weakened. Funding costs rose sharply. The stock was sold down aggressively, with investors questioning whether the group’s broad capital markets exposure made it structurally too vulnerable to macroeconomic swings.

The Bank of Jamaica reduced its policy rate from 7% to 6% between July and December 2024. The Dominican Republic followed a similar trajectory. The US Federal Reserve cut rates by 50 basis points between November and December 2024, bringing the policy band from 4.25% to 4.50%. These moves, while still leaving rates well above pre-pandemic levels, were enough to materially shift financial market conditions across the Caribbean. Bond prices began recovering. Liquidity improved. Spreads widened in ways that benefited securities-heavy balance sheets. Trading conditions normalised.

“Net interest income surged 38% to J$11.19 billion. Trading gains leapt 41% to J$5.06 billion. These are not the numbers of a company managing a slow recovery. They are the numbers of a leveraged recovery being unlocked all at once.”

JMMB’s Chief Financial Officer, Patrick Ellis, noted that proactive portfolio management and funding optimisation contributed significantly to the improved performance, particularly in the management of cost of funds and capital deployment. The group’s Jamaica operation saw its contribution to net operating revenue increase by 12% and its operating profit improved by 48%. That improvement did not arrive by accident. It reflected two years of structural work done under pressure, during exactly the kind of conditions that expose whether a financial institution’s management team genuinely knows how to navigate adversity.

What the 138% headline number does not fully capture is the role played by JMMB’s strategic investment in Sagicor Financial Company, the regional insurance and banking giant listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Holding approximately 23.5% of Sagicor’s issued shares, JMMB has constructed an associate earnings stream that operates entirely independently of its own revenue cycle. For the nine months ending December 2024, that stake contributed an estimated J$2.4 billion net of financing costs. In a prior period, when Sagicor completed its landmark acquisition of Ivari Holdings, a mid-size Canadian life insurer, the contribution was even more dramatic: JMMB’s share of profit from that transaction reached J$16.28 billion, accompanied by J$1.38 billion in dividends, one of the largest single profit contributions in the group’s history. JMMB Group CEO Keith Duncan described it plainly as one of the highest profits the group had ever delivered. Sagicor’s core Jamaican business simultaneously reported a 31% rise in net insurance and investment results to J$26.45 billion. The investment thesis has not merely worked. It has compounded into a structural advantage that most of JMMB’s regional competitors cannot easily replicate.

Sagicor context:  Sagicor Financial Company’s 2024 guidance projected core net income to shareholders of US$90 to US$105 million, with 2025 targets set at 10% above that figure and a medium-term return on equity target of 13%. JMMB, as the company’s largest shareholder with 23.54% of issued shares, receives a proportionate share of every dollar of that growth.

The Reconstruction Opportunity

On October 28, 2025, Hurricane Melissa made landfall on Jamaica’s southern coast as a Category 5 storm carrying sustained winds exceeding 185 miles per hour. It was the most powerful Atlantic hurricane of the year and the most destructive natural event to strike Jamaica since Hurricane Gilbert in 1988. The Planning Institute of Jamaica subsequently confirmed total damage, losses and costs at US$12.232 billion, equivalent to 56.7% of Jamaica’s entire 2024 gross domestic product. Physical damage alone stood at US$8.8 billion. The full-year GDP contraction for fiscal year 2025 to 2026 was projected at negative 4.5% before a recovery to positive 3.3% growth by fiscal year 2027 to 2028.

Hurricane Melissa — The Reconstruction Financing Landscape

Total damage, losses and costs confirmed by PIOJ   US$12.2B	Private capital mobilisation component of reconstruction programme   US$2.4B
Estimated energy grid restoration bill for JPS alone   US$350M	Share of JPS customers left without electricity post-Melissa   77%
International support package assembled by IMF, World Bank, IDB and CDB   US$6.7B	Private capital mobilisation component of the reconstruction programme   US$2.4B

The international response to Melissa has been substantial. The IMF, World Bank Group, Inter-American Development Bank and Caribbean Development Bank jointly assembled a US$6.7 billion support package over three years, announced in December 2025 at the request of Prime Minister Andrew Holness. In January 2026, the IMF approved a US$415 million disbursement for hurricane relief and recovery, raising total immediately available resources to US$1.077 billion. Jamaica’s pre-arranged catastrophe bond, structured by Aon and backed by the World Bank’s capital at risk programme, disbursed its full US$150 million coverage. The country, the first Caribbean nation to independently sponsor a catastrophe bond of this kind, demonstrated exactly the kind of financial innovation that sophisticated capital markets infrastructure makes possible.

But multilateral financing and catastrophe bonds are liquidity mechanisms. They keep economies functioning in the immediate aftermath of disaster. They cannot, by design, finance the multi-year capital programs needed to rebuild road networks, reconstruct bridge infrastructure, restore and modernise energy grids, and develop climate-resilient housing across western Jamaica’s devastated communities. That requires private capital, structured over long timeframes, channelled through financial intermediaries with the institutional capacity to design and distribute sophisticated investment instruments.

This is precisely the space that JMMB’s capital markets team and investment banking unit are moving into. Group CEO Keith Duncan confirmed at a recent investor briefing that the team is actively positioning for increased deal flow as Jamaica transitions from emergency recovery to structural infrastructure rebuilding. PPP activity linked to reconstruction is projected at approximately US$2.4 billion, creating significant scope for bond issuance, structured financing and advisory mandates. “We have a capital markets team that is tuned in and would be clear where the opportunities would reside,” Duncan said. Jamaica’s Finance Minister Fayval Williams added further momentum in her March 2026 budget speech by announcing that pension fund limits on private equity investment will rise from 5% to 7.5% of total assets in fiscal year 2026 to 2027, then to 10% by April 2027. With approximately J$847 billion in pension assets at September 2025, Phase 1 immediately frees an estimated J$21.2 billion in patient domestic capital, with a further J$28.2 billion unlocked in Phase 2.

“Jamaica’s reconstruction does not simply need more loans. It needs a capital architecture. The difference between a lender and an architect of capital is precisely the distinction that separates JMMB from a traditional commercial bank in this environment.”

Quality of Earnings Matters

Investors who have watched JMMB across multiple cycles will rightly ask whether this earnings recovery reflects genuine operational improvement or a more temporary intersection of favourable market conditions. The honest answer is that it is both, and the distinction between those two components matters significantly for how the stock should be valued.

The structural elements of the recovery are very real and durable. Net interest income growth of 38% to J$11.19 billion reflects a genuine improvement in funding mixture and balance sheet management; the outcome was simply years of deliberate work during the rate-hiking cycle rather than simply a windfall from lower rates. Loan and notes receivable portfolio growth of 9% to J$217.24 billion shows that core banking operations are expanding at a measured and credible pace. Customer deposits climbed 13% to J$226.32 billion, indicating continuous client confidence in the group’s stability even during its most difficult earnings period. Total assets grew 4% year on year to J$705.46 billion. Off-balance-sheet funds under management rose to J$214.43 billion, up from J$205.94 billion in the prior period, as clients continued to entrust the group with long-term investment mandates.

The more cyclical factors deserve equal highlight. A meaningful portion of the profit recovery came from trading gains tied to improving market conditions and from the mark-to-market recovery in investment portfolios that had been written down during the rate-hiking cycle. Those gains are real. They are also reversible. If the US Federal Reserve reverses course in response to renewed inflationary pressures, regional central banks that had been cutting rates could quickly stall or reverse. JMMB’s earnings sensitivity to that scenario remains higher than that of a traditional commercial lender. The group’s own management acknowledged as much, noting that the expected path of interest rate reductions remains on hold and could continue to compress net interest margins if conditions deteriorate.

There is also the structural strain of Jamaica’s distortionary asset tax, which JMMB has long identified as a disproportionate burden on financial institutions. The tax, originally introduced in 2012 as a temporary three-year austerity measure, contributed a J$1.14 billion charge in a single quarter that represented more than twice the company’s dividend payment in the same period. Its continued burden remains a genuine constraint on profitability that no amount of capital markets deal flow can fully offset.

Regional Diversification Is Becoming More Valuable

The inclination of Jamaican investors to evaluate JMMB primarily through a domestic lens has never been more misleading than it is in 2026. The group’s four-territory operating structure is not a collection of secondary bases supporting a Jamaican core business. It is a genuinely integrated regional platform in which each market is navigating its own economic cycle, and the portfolio effect of those different cycles is becoming increasingly visible in the group’s combined results.

Revenue by Territory — Nine Months to December 2024

Territory	Revenue  Share	Key Trend
Jamaica	54%	+12% operating profit
Dominican Republic	21%	Solar parks + tourism expansion
Trinidad & Tobago	16%	Steady energy-economy anchor
Barbados	9%	+35% revenue surge

The Dominican Republic operation, often underdiscussed in Jamaican investment commentary, is becoming one of the group’s most strategically valuable assets. The country’s tourism and infrastructure sectors are expanding at a rate that few Caribbean economies can match. Rate reductions by the Dominican central bank created improved capital market conditions that directly benefited JMMB’s securities and investment business in that territory. More significantly, JMMB recently completed a buyout transaction with Global Dominion Access covering six solar parks in the Dominican Republic, a move that signals active strategic capital deployment rather than mere financial participation in the country’s growth. In a region where energy infrastructure investment is a critical development priority, that kind of positioning has compounding strategic value.

Barbados delivered the most striking territorial performance during the reporting period, with revenues rising 35% to J$4 billion, the largest proportional increase of any territory in the group. The story behind that number is one of patient institutional building paying off. JMMB maintained and grew its securities business in Barbados through the island’s prolonged fiscal consolidation period following its debt restructuring. As Barbados’s debt-to-GDP trajectory has improved and economic stability has returned, the capital market conditions that JMMB had positioned itself to exploit have finally opened. Management mentioned current liquidity conditions as supportive of further growth in the Barbados securities business.

Trinidad and Tobago, contributing 16% of revenues, provides the group with a commodity-economy anchor that moves to its own oil and gas-driven cycle and therefore adds real diversification rather than simply replicating Jamaican macroeconomic dynamics. For a group managing four jurisdictions with four distinct central banks and four separate regulatory environments, the ability to capture growth in one market when conditions compress in another is not theoretical. The fiscal year 2025 to 2026 results, in which Barbados surged while Jamaica recovered and the Dominican Republic expanded, are a live demonstration of the portfolio effect working exactly as designed.

Why the Market Still Hesitates

Despite the earnings rebound, the quality of operational improvement, and the scale of the opportunity ahead, JMMB’s stock continues to trade at approximately half of book value. Book value per share stood at roughly J$33 at the end of the third quarter. The market price at the close of trading on February 13, 2026, was J$16.87. That is not a minor discount. It is the market rendering a judgment that the group’s earnings recovery is not yet sufficiently proven to warrant a full normalisation of the valuation.

That judgment is not irrational. Investors remember the volatility of the rate-hiking cycle with clarity. They remember how quickly the group’s earnings deteriorated when market conditions turned. They remember the IFRS 17 accounting adjustments that created a J$1.5 billion share of loss from Sagicor in a single quarter due to marked-to-market swings and actuarial adjustments, the same stake that had generated J$16.28 billion in profit the year before. The Sagicor investment is a powerful structural asset, but it introduces a degree of earnings volatility that the market prices conservatively. The distortionary asset tax remains an unresolved strain. And the reconstruction mandate, while compelling in its strategic logic, has yet to produce reported deal revenues that investors can point to.

What the market is essentially communicating is a demand for proof over two or three more consecutive reporting periods before it is prepared to rerate the stock. That is the rational behaviour of investors who have been burned by premature optimism before. It is also, for investors with a longer time horizon, a description of an opportunity. The most productive investment moments in Caribbean financial markets have historically arrived when fundamental improvement precedes the full restoration of market confidence. JMMB appears to be occupying precisely that gap today.

Valuation note: JMMB stock traded at approximately J$16.87 against a book value per share of roughly J$33 at end of Q3 FY2025/26, implying a price-to-book ratio of approximately 0.5x. The discount reflects lingering market caution following the rate-hiking cycle’s earnings volatility, even as fundamentals show measurable improvement across every key operating metric.

The Bigger Picture

Step back far enough from the quarterly numbers, and what comes into view is something larger than any single earnings report or recovery cycle. Jamaica is attempting something that very few small island developing states have successfully managed in the post-disaster period: a reconstruction strategy built not around dependency on multilateral grant funding but around the mobilisation of private capital at scale through sophisticated financial market infrastructure. The catastrophe bond that paid out US$150 million within days of Melissa’s landfall was not an accident. It was the product of a decade of deliberate financial system building. The pension fund regulatory reform that is about to unlock nearly J$50 billion in domestic institutional capital for private equity investment is not a coincidence. It is a policy designed to address a structural gap that every serious analyst of Caribbean capital markets has identified for years.

JMMB is not merely a beneficiary of these developments. Through its capital markets team, its investment banking unit, its regional distribution infrastructure and its Sagicor stake, it is one of the financial institutions best positioned to act as an active participant in engineering them. Roads and bridge networks connecting agricultural communities to markets. Energy grid infrastructure rebuilt to climate-resilient standards, with renewable capacity displacing ageing fossil fuel generation. Social infrastructure is financed through sale-and-leaseback structures that recycle government capital into further rebuilding. Each of these represents not merely a reconstruction project but a capital markets transaction. Each one requires an underwriter, a structurer, a distributor, an adviser. JMMB has publicly stated its intention to be in that room.

The 138% profit surge will dominate the headlines for another quarter. But the more important number may be US$2.4 billion, the scale of the PPP and reconstruction financing pipeline that JMMB’s capital markets team is aligning itself to capture. In a region where financial institutions capable of structuring and distributing large infrastructure deals are genuinely scarce, the competitive advantage of being ready, capable and explicitly positioned when the mandates begin to flow is not easily replicated. Whether JMMB fully converts that positioning into reported earnings over the next 18 months is the question the market is waiting to answer. The foundations, however, have rarely looked more deliberately constructed than they do today.

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Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security. The views expressed are those of the author.

David Welsh is an emerging Investment Analyst with a strong foundation in Economics and Management Studies. He is deeply passionate about investments, financial literacy, and organisational leadership, with a clear commitment to driving impact through finance. David has demonstrated a consistent track record of excellence across both academic and professional spheres. He currently serves as Impact Officer for the Global Shapers Kingston Hub (an initiative of the World Economic Forum) and previously held the role of President of the Young Investors Club at The University of the West Indies (UWI). His analytical and leadership capabilities were further recognised when he won UWI’s CFA Investment Research Competition. Beyond academia, David has successfully led high-performing marketing teams on both local and international stages, showcasing his versatility and strategic mindset. With a dynamic blend of technical expertise, leadership experience, and a passion for growth, he is widely regarded as a rising talent to watch in the investment landscape.