HURRICANE Beryl has disrupted the deadline given to deposit-taking institutions (DTIs) by the Bank of Jamaica (BOJ) to fully implement minimum service standards for automated banking machines (ABMs).

Following widespread consumer complaints, the central bank in April gave DTIs nine months to implement the standards. Improvement in service was almost immediate as there were fewer complaints about ABMs running out of cash.

However, the country’s 883-strong ABM network was hit hard by Beryl which impacted the island on July 3. The parishes of St Elizabeth, Clarendon, Manchester and Westmoreland were among the hardest-hit. Many sections of these parishes remain without electricity and Internet connection, and as such have no ABM service.

A BOJ team, led by Governor Richard Byles, spoke to the issue on Thursday when they appeared before the Parliament’s Economy and Production Committee.

Noting that the intention was that the DTIs would achieve the service standards over time, Byles said, “We have published a couple months of reports on these machines, by bank, by geography, and we’ve seen improvements over the months and then came Beryl and that has been an obvious setback.”

Byles noted that before the setback, the BOJ had “good interactions with the banks regarding the need to improve their ABM services”.

“I think they were seized of the importance in the public’s mind of raising the standards and they agreed to cooperate and that cooperation was actually in action until Beryl came,” he emphasised.

Continuing, Byles said: “We have the challenge now of building back to those standards and until we can get power back, Internet back into all of the communities, we’re going to see that these standards remain fairly low.”

The central bank governor explained that because the bigger banks have a higher concentration of ABMs in the worst-affected parishes, the smaller banks may appear to have good ratios compared to the larger institutions.

Meanwhile, Deputy BOJ Governor Dr Jide Lewis told the committee that the central bank had been seeing improvements in the service level standards for up-time and for cash availability at the ABMs.

“I recall that under the standards, all banks are required to have 90 per cent of their ABMs operating in any given month, and they’re required for those ABMs to have an up-time of 95 per cent or more,” Lewis noted.

He outlined that up to April, for most entities, as much as 97 per cent of their ABMs were operational in any given month.

“We were seeing up-times that were trending between 92 per cent and 93 per cent, not quite at the 95 per cent but recall when we started, the up-time would have been 89 per cent.

“They were on their way to the 95 per cent but of course Beryl would have struck and we would have seen where entities are now in a rebuilding phase,” Lewis stated.

He pointed to the latest update as at Wednesday, July 17, which showed that “a number of ABMs that are operational are varying between 87 per cent and I think the lowest percentage is 68 per cent for one of our larger banks, and the highest would be 90 per cent. So the range has now fallen between 68 per cent and 90 per cent as against pre-Beryl which would have been somewhere between 88 per cent and 93 per cent in terms of up-time.”

The deputy governor said the main issues cited by DTIs in getting their ABMs up and running are the lack of electricity and Internet connection.

“They do have UPS as back-up but those things last for hours not for days and weeks, so that is going to be a constraint,” he remarked.

Lewis is advising the public that while all branches across the 11 DTIs are open, the quality of service may be less than ideal.

“If power goes during the course of the day, maybe the AC (air conditioning) machine is not working, perhaps the system is running slower, but the branches are open. Where we’re seeing the degradation in terms of service delivery has to do with ABMs. It will take them time and it will be heavily related to how quickly the provision of electricity and the provision of data services will be brought back on-stream,” he said.