Jamaica is not excluding people from finance by choice. It is excluding them by process.
Every delay in opening an account, every manual underwriting step, every conservative credit assessment that defaults to “no” is a quiet decision made by a system that was never designed for the people it now serves. Inclusion fails not at the policy level, but at the operational one.
This is the unresolved gap Jamaica now faces. While intent has been clearly articulated through legislative reform, everyday financial interactions still carry unnecessary friction. Onboarding takes too long. Credit decisions move too slowly. The cost of serving lower-income customers remains high, making exclusion an outcome of inefficiency rather than regulation.
The National Financial Inclusion Strategy (NFIS) implicitly challenges this reality. Its focus on access, digital payments, and expanded credit signals a need to rethink how financial systems function—not merely how rules are enforced. That thinking aligns with wider national direction. The Prime Minister has spoken about the need for a new financial regulatory framework to position Jamaica for growth, emphasizing smarter regulation that protects stability while enabling progress. The message is subtle but consequential: regulation is not the constraint—outdated systems are.
The tension becomes most visible in credit. Serving lower-income borrowers and micro-businesses requires faster decision-making, better use of data, and workflows that can scale without weakening oversight. When underwriting systems cannot do this efficiently, exclusion becomes an operational side effect rather than an explicit choice.
Smaller banks and microfinance providers are often closest to these communities, yet they face the same bottlenecks as larger institutions: manual processes, compliance strain, and difficulty demonstrating control to regulators. Without modern, well-engineered technology, proximity alone cannot deliver inclusion at pace.
The NFIS makes one principle clear: access and integrity must advance together. Simplified customer due diligence (CDD), digital payments, and broader credit access only succeed when supported by systems that embed controls into workflows, protect data, and preserve trust.
Policy has opened the door. What determines success now is how financial systems are built.
Financial inclusion will not be achieved by policy alone. It has to be engineered.