Ashford W. Meikle, Staff Reporter
( left ) NCB's chairman, Michael Lee Chin. ( right ) BNS CEO, William 'Bill Clarke.
THE COUNTRY'S two oldest banks - National Commercial Bank (NCB) and the Bank of Nova Scotia Jamaica Limited (BNS) - continue to control the lion's share of commercial bank deposits, according to the central bank's statistics.
At the end of March this year, NCB and BNS held, between them, $182 billion or almost eighty per cent of the deposits on record at the Bank of Jamaica. Total deposits amount to over $234 billion among the six banking entities.
In the continuing battle between the 'big two', Scotiabank is ahead of NCB by some $16.4 billion. With $99 billion in customer deposits, BNS controls roughly 42 per cent of the pie while NCB's slice amounts to almost $83 million or just over 35 per cent.
There is a wide gap between these two and the rest of the competition. For example, RBTT, the nearest competitor, holds just nine per cent of total deposits, followed by First-Caribbean with a little over six per cent. The two smallest banks - Citibank and First Global - have, respectively, four and three per cent of total deposits.
While Scotiabank has some $16.4 billion more in deposits than NCB, the latter experienced a faster growth in its deposits over a two-year period. For example, compared to 2003, NCB's deposits have grown by almost 25 per cent compared to the 19 per cent of the Bank of Nova Scotia.
GRIP SLIPPING
But, while both NCB and Scotiabank control the bulk of the customer deposits, there are signs that their grip on the retail banking industry may be slipping, however slightly. The best-performing bank over the past two years is the Grace-Kennedy subsidiary, First Global Bank, which has seen its share of the market mushroom.
NCB's growth in deposits lagged behind that of Citibank (32 per cent) and First Global, whose deposit base recorded an increase of almost 630 per cent. Customer deposits for RBTT and FirstCaribbean grew by 18 and 13 per cent respectively.
The BNS share of deposits has fallen by some two per cent since March 2003 (when it controlled 44 per cent) while NCB's share barely registered an increase, from 35.2 per cent in 2003 to 35.3 per cent in 2005.
