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An insider’s analysis of how Jamaica’s 150-year-old financial institution arrived at crisis — and why the AGM offered no credible path out

At the Jamaica National Group’s Annual General Meeting on January 27, 2026, Chief Executive Officer Earl Jarrett spoke repeatedly of hope. Hope for a turnaround. Hope that the numbers would improve. Hope that the strategies being implemented would bear fruit.

What he did not offer was a plan.

After three consecutive years of multi-billion dollar losses — $2.3 billion in FY2023, $3.4 billion in FY2024, and $2.3 billion in FY2025 — the 1.3 million members of Jamaica’s oldest and most recognisable financial institution deserved more than vague references to “driving efficiencies through the execution of strategic priorities. “They deserved specifics: what went wrong, who is accountable, and precisely how leadership intends to fix it.

Instead, they received management speak. And management speak, however polished, does not pay down $11 billion in accumulated losses.

The Numbers That Cannot Be Spun

The December 2025 CariCRIS credit report makes for sobering reading. The ratings agency affirmed JN Group’s credit rating but downgraded its outlook to negative — a formal warning that further deterioration could trigger a full downgrade. The underlying metrics explain why.

The Group’s cost-to-income ratio now stands at 105.6 per cent. In plain terms, JN spends $1.06 to generate every $1.00 of income.

This is not a temporary blip caused by one-off restructuring costs. This is a structural problem that has persisted across multiple financial years and reflects an organisation that has lost control of its cost base.

More concerning still is the erosion of the Group’s tangible net worth — the capital buffer that protects depositors and absorbs unexpected losses. This has declined to just 7.4 per cent of total assets. For every $100 the Group holds, only $7.40 represents shareholders’ equity.

 In an economy vulnerable to hurricanes, global interest rate shocks, and correspondent banking restrictions, this is a dangerously thin margin of safety.

CariCRIS has been explicit about what it would take to restore a stable outlook: sustained profitability, a cost-to-income ratio below 65 per cent for two consecutive years, and tangible net worth restored to 20 per cent of assets. These are not arbitrary targets. 

They represent the minimum thresholds for a healthy financial institution.

At the AGM, Mr Jarrett did not explain how the Group intends to cut its cost-to-income ratio by 40 percentage points. He did not outline a multi-year capital restoration plan. He expressed hope.

$3 Billion in Technology, Zero Transformation

Over the past five years, the JN Group has invested more than $3 billion in technology. The stated objectives were clear: digital transformation, improved customer experience, operational efficiency, and reduced costs.

The results tell a different story.

The ONE JN Passport — the Group’s flagship digital onboarding platform — was launched four years ago with considerable fanfare. It was designed to be the single authentication and KYC gateway across all JN member companies, eliminating duplicate processes and creating a seamless customer experience.

Four years later, exactly one member company has adopted it.

In 2025 alone, JN Bank launched three separate mobile applications: JN Pay Wallet, JN Live Personal, and JN MyCard. In December, JN Money Services released its own mobile app.

None of these applications integrates with the ONE JN Passport. Each operates as a standalone product with its own authentication requirements.

This is not a technology failure. The Passport works. This is a strategic failure — an organisation that launches initiatives without the institutional discipline to ensure adoption, and a leadership culture that permits individual business units to ignore Group-wide strategic priorities.

When technology is deployed as a solution before the underlying business problem is clearly defined — when systems are forced onto broken processes rather than processes being redesigned around new capabilities — the inevitable result is expensive infrastructure that changes nothing. JN has spent $3 billion and has neither transformed its operations nor materially reduced its cost base.

The definition of insanity, it is often said, is doing the same thing repeatedly while expecting different results. The JN Group has made this its operating model.

The UK Bank Tells the Real Story

For years, JN Bank UK was characterised internally as a burden — a capital-intensive subsidiary that drained resources from the Jamaican operation. The decision to sell the majority stake to Step One Money UK Limited in 2024 was framed as a necessary surgery to “cauterise the financial bleed.”

At the AGM, Mr Jarrett confirmed what many suspected: JN Bank UK is now projected to be profitable within its first full year under new ownership.

This revelation deserves more scrutiny than it received. If a loss-making subsidiary can achieve profitability within twelve months of a change in ownership, the problem was never the market, the regulatory environment, or the inherent economics of the business. The problem was management.

The same leadership team that could not make JN Bank UK work remains in place at the parent company. The same strategic approach that failed in the UK is being applied to the Jamaican operations. Members are entitled to ask: why should the outcome be any different?

The Culture Behind the Crisis

Financial results are lagging indicators. 

By the time losses appear on the balance sheet, the decisions that caused them were made years earlier. Understanding JN’s current predicament requires understanding the organisational culture that produced it.

Consider the planning horizon.

 Strategy at JN operates on twelve-month cycles. Objectives are set annually with the expectation that results will materialise within the same year. There is no publicly articulated three-year plan. There are no medium-term milestones against which progress can be measured.

In a business where major technology implementations take two to three years to deliver returns, this short-termism guarantees that nothing strategic ever reaches maturity before being abandoned or redirected.

Consider the leadership structure. 

Mr Jarrett, by the Group’s own organisational design, has twenty-nine direct reports. This is not a structure that enables strategic focus. It is a structure that ensures the CEO is consumed by operational minutiae while strategic direction drifts. It is also a structure where accountability dissolves — when everyone reports to one person, no one is truly responsible for anything.

Consider what happens to expertise. Over the past five years, the Group has recruited several experienced leaders into ostensibly strategic positions — individuals with genuine track records of digital transformation at other institutions. 

Almost without exception, they have departed within two years. The pattern is consistent: initial optimism gives way to frustration as expertise is ignored, initiatives are micromanaged, and the institutional hierarchy reasserts itself. The message is clear: at JN, tenure matters more than capability, and the person at the top of the chart must always know best, regardless of evidence to the contrary.

This is how an organisation spends $3 billion on technology and ends up with four incompatible mobile apps

Market Position Does Not Lie

Perhaps the most damning verdict on JN’s strategic execution comes not from credit rating agencies or financial statements, but from the market itself. JN Bank was once Jamaica’s number one mortgage provider. It is now number three.

Mortgage lending is a core competency for an institution that began as a building society 150 years ago. Losing market leadership in your foundational business is not a minor setback. It is an institutional failure that reflects years of underinvestment, poor customer experience, and competitive complacency.

The Group’s annual report speaks of “People First” as a strategic pillar. Yet there is no evidence of systematic investment in people development, no credible succession planning, and no accountability when leaders fail to deliver.

When two senior executives — the Managing Directors of JN Financial Group and MCS Group — depart in quick succession and are replaced by internal appointments to acting roles, it does not signal a deep bench of prepared successors. It signals an organisation scrambling to fill gaps it should have anticipated.

What a Real Turnaround Would Require

Turnarounds are possible. Distressed institutions can be stabilised, restructured, and returned to health. But successful turnarounds share common characteristics that are notably absent from JN’s current approach.

They begin with an honest diagnosis. Not “challenging macroeconomic conditions” or “managerial shortcomings” buried in a written statement, but a clear-eyed acknowledgement of what went wrong and why. JN’s leadership has not provided this.

They establish measurable multi-year targets with interim milestones. CariCRIS has told the Group exactly what it needs to achieve. The Group has not told its members how or when it intends to get there.

They involve accountability. When an organisation loses billions of dollars over multiple years, someone is responsible. At JN, the same leadership team that presided over the losses remains in place, and the same board that approved the failed strategies continues to provide oversight.

They often require new leadership. Not because existing leaders are bad people, but because turnarounds demand different skills than steady-state management, and because institutional credibility sometimes requires visible change. There is no indication that JN’s board has seriously considered this option.

What Members Deserve

The Jamaica National Group is a mutual organisation. It exists, in theory, for the benefit of its members — not for external shareholders, not for executive management, but for the 1.3 million Jamaicans who have entrusted it with their savings.

Those members have now watched three consecutive years of losses erode the institution’s capital base. They have seen a credit rating agency issue a formal warning about the Group’s financial trajectory. They have heard their CEO speak of hope while offering no concrete plan.

Hope is not a strategy. And after $11 billion in losses, it is no longer an acceptable substitute for one.

The JN Group’s challenges are serious but not insurmountable. Jamaica’s economy is growing. The diaspora remittance market remains robust. Digital financial services represent a genuine opportunity. But seizing these opportunities requires leadership that can execute — leadership that sets clear priorities and enforces them across business units, that invests in technology strategically rather than reactively, that builds genuine accountability rather than organisational charts, and that has the humility to recognise when its approach is not working.

Whether the current leadership team is capable of this remains, after the AGM, an open question. The numbers suggest an answer. The market has already rendered its verdict on the mortgage business. And the leaders who came to help and left in frustration have voted with their feet.

JN’s members deserve better than hope. They deserve answers. And if answers are not forthcoming, they are entitled to ask whether different leadership might provide them.