Trust in Motion: Commerce, Money and Resilience in the Digital Era
Address by Dr Brian Langrin, Governor
Jamaica Chamber of Commerce
Friday, 30 October 2026
Salutations and opening
Mr Emile Leiba, President of the Jamaica Chamber of Commerce; members of the Board and Executive; members of the Chamber; specially invited guests; members of the media; ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, Mr President, for the invitation, and good morning to you all.
Trust in motion begins with everyday commerce. A merchant’s phone can now be a till, an invoice book and a doorway to credit. But a storm can interrupt the last mile of payment, and a cyber incident can test confidence even when payment networks keep operating. I came to office in August at this consequential moment. New technologies are changing how people and businesses create, exchange and safeguard value, and every country must adapt. Jamaica’s choice is not whether commerce will modernise, but whether we will shape that transformation so that innovation strengthens trust in the Jamaican dollar rather than puts it at risk. As money and commerce become more digital, the central question remains: what makes our money trustworthy?
My answer is simple: trust must move with commerce. That trust must run through everything: the value of our currency, the strength of our institutions, the reliability of our payment systems and the protection of consumers. And it must hold firm along every route money takes to reach a household or business.
Trust in motion rests on four priorities. First, price stability: the Bank’s foundation. Second, connected payments: modernisation must connect the whole economy rather than leave payment providers’ platforms isolated. Third, productive inclusion: real opportunities for our underserved population to trade, save, invest and withstand shocks. And fourth, resilience: several reliable payment routes, tested before the next hurricane or cyberattack.
A week that tells the story
This past week brought those priorities into focus as we marked one year since Hurricane Melissa crossed Jamaica. I first want to acknowledge the lives lost, the families still rebuilding and the businesses that reopened unsure whether customers would return. They did, not by luck, but through the work of people in this room.
The Bank of Jamaica is embarking on a transformative modernisation of Jamaica’s payments and financial market infrastructure. Melissa showed why this transformation must look beyond liquidity to delivering value when roads are blocked, branches closed, power and telecommunications fail, cash runs short and customer records are incomplete. Our core financial system remained sound, but the last mile was exposed. A household cannot spend liquidity it cannot reach; a merchant cannot trade with a payment instrument it cannot accept.
This week also brought a different test. Cyber threats are accelerating, not just here but worldwide. IMF research published this year found that cyberattacks have almost doubled since before the pandemic and cyber-enabled fraud has nearly tripled over the past decade. For our financial sector, this is not a distant risk. On 22 October, JETS Limited disclosed a cyber incident affecting a limited part of its internal administrative systems. The Bank has since confirmed that the MultiLink debit-card and ACH networks remained fully operational. JETS advised that PINs, card-verification values and expiry dates were not stored in the affected systems. The Bank engaged JETS, member institutions and the relevant national authorities, and we continue to monitor developments as overseer of the national payment system. The lesson is clear: as cyber threats evolve, institutions must keep strengthening their defences. They must prevent and detect attacks, contain them when they occur and recover quickly. That is how we protect not just our systems, but the public’s trust in them.
A hurricane and a cyber incident pose the same question: can commerce continue when a critical dependency fails? Both reveal the difference between new infrastructure that exists and infrastructure tested under stress.
The monetary anchor
Resilient commerce begins with trusted money. We guard the Jamaican dollar’s value, financial system soundness, and payment system safety and efficiency. Digital modernisation makes these unchanged responsibilities even more important.
Annual inflation was 8.6 per cent in September, above our 4 to 6 per cent target range, and food was the main driver. Damaged crop yields, global conflict, high energy prices and rebuilding demand are placing pressure on prices. In response, the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee raised the policy rate by 50 basis points to 6.0 per cent in September. But interest rates cannot reverse a hurricane or grow a crop. They can, however, stop the effects of repeated shocks from becoming embedded in wages, prices and expectations. We expect inflation to remain elevated in the near term and return to target by mid-2027, subject to geopolitical and supply developments.
Keeping prices stable also means addressing recurring food supply shocks. Alongside monetary policy, I see scope to explore whether tools beyond interest rates could strengthen food supply. This is a question for assessment, not a commitment to a new programme. What could encourage financing for climate-resilient agriculture, irrigation, cold storage and stronger supply chains? Better analysis of weather shocks’ effects on prices and expectations would inform that assessment. The aim would be fewer crop losses and supply bottlenecks, less inflation from future shocks, more dependable food supplies and less disruption to household budgets. Such tools would complement monetary policy, not replace it. Any proposal would require BOJ staff assessment, consistency with our legal mandate, sound risk controls, coordination with responsible public authorities, clear eligibility rules and measures of success.
Resilience depends on confidence in future price stability. Businesses help anchor inflation expectations: do not treat today’s inflation as permanent when setting tomorrow’s contracts. Stable prices let small firms quote confidently, households plan and investors commit capital. No payment technology can restore trust in an untrusted unit of account.
The BOJ strengthens Jamaica’s monetary and financial resilience from a position of strength. At end-September, gross international reserves exceeded US$7 billion, approximately 156 per cent of the reserve-adequacy measure. The renewed US$150 million catastrophe bond was triggered in full by Melissa, while deposit-taking institutions maintained adequate capital and liquidity. The lesson is preparation before disruption, across monetary, climate, cyber and payment resilience.
A moment for commerce transformation
With sound money and financial resilience as our foundation, we can turn to modernising commerce. Digitalisation makes payment electronic; transformation makes commerce more connected, inclusive, productive and resilient. The aim is to make payments a gateway to the formal economy: helping a small business create reliable sales records, build an observable financial history and, with its consent, give a regulated lender cash flow evidence to assess working capital finance when conventional collateral is limited. Digital payment tools and these records can also lower acceptance and bookkeeping costs. Trusted identity, customer-consented data and inclusive digital services are essential to making that pathway work.
Since my appointment in August, the Bank has engaged in strategic dialogue with international development partners, with the aim of shaping commerce transformation. Jamaica will make its own choices. Our partners help test our vision for next-generation payments and financial market infrastructure against international experience, sequence immediate and longer-term priorities, and strengthen the legal, technical and institutional foundations for safe delivery.
The business opportunities I have described matter, not just to the financial sector, but also to agriculture, fisheries, tourism-linked enterprises, the creative economy and every small business whose productive capacity is greater than a ‘thin file’ at a credit institution suggests. For these enterprises, the benefits extend beyond payment and credit: separating household and business finances, issuing digital invoices and demonstrating sales can make formal participation easier and more valuable, opening opportunities to obtain working capital, insure assets and enter larger supply chains.
Our direction is clear: one connected digital payments and financial market infrastructure ecosystem, not separate projects. It must be safe, efficient, interoperable, inclusive and resilient; preserve central bank money as the settlement anchor; support competition and responsible innovation; and serve the public through normal conditions, disruption and technological change.
For business and the public, those principles translate into three tests. Can people move money safely and with legal certainty? Can services connect across payment providers, devices and communities at a reasonable cost? And can the payment system keep operating, recover and offer a fallback when disruption comes? Innovation matters only when it passes those tests and solves a defined public problem.
Two tracks, one destination
The BOJ will pursue that direction on two tracks: faster everyday digital retail payments first, alongside controlled experiments with tokenised payments with any rollout over the medium term subject to successful testing and fresh approval. Track A is our immediate priority: an integrated and inclusive fast payment capability that lets households, merchants, businesses and government send and receive funds instantly, around the clock. Banks, fintechs and other qualified non-bank providers should connect through common standards and coherent rules. We will define the public outcomes before selecting technology, then assess every option for capability, cost, resilience, governance and market readiness.
JAM-DEX, our central bank digital currency, will have a clearly defined role within the national payments ecosystem. We will assess whether it should operate as an interoperable rail within a wider fast payment arrangement or should concentrate on specific public-value use cases. Fast payments do not require novel distributed-ledger technology, and our early adoption of JAM-DEX does not mean that every function must sit on one platform. Policy objectives must determine the technology, not the reverse.
For customers, payments should be simple: identify the recipient, pay confidently, receive immediate confirmation and reconcile in real time. The Bank must ensure clear, dependable rules for access, settlement, pricing, fraud protection, recourse, data protection and continuity.
For a small economy, fragmentation is expensive. Parallel payment platforms divide liquidity, merchant investment, transaction volumes and public attention. We therefore want one coherent national acceptance environment, with regulated providers competing in service, innovation and customer experience, not in incompatible rails.
That is the immediate retail payment task. Track B asks a longer-term question: can controlled wholesale and tokenisation experiments significantly reduce the cost and friction of moving liquidity, collateral and securities? We would assess whether they can also deliver instant settlement, automated reconciliation and proportionate supervisory visibility. We will explore these questions carefully over the medium term, without allowing experimentation to displace today’s fast payment retail priorities.
One pilot candidate would test whether bringing domestic and overseas transactions together on a single BOJ permissioned platform can reduce the cost and operational friction of liquidity transfers, collateral mobilisation, intraday financing and reconciliation. Participating banks and authorised supervisors would share a synchronised transaction record, a single source of truth, with appropriate privacy and access controls. Using eligible tokenised cash and securities, the pilot would test automatic transfers triggered by agreed conditions and all-or-nothing settlement. Existing infrastructure would remain authoritative where required. This would be a controlled pilot, not an approved production system; any move to production would require a separate assessment and fresh approval. The ultimate goal is to reduce high transaction charges for the consumer, but the pilot must establish whether this approach can help achieve that goal.
Assessment would be guided by demonstrable public benefit, not a Web3 label or any other technology branding. The pilot would proceed only if it passes three tests. First, it must offer a clear advantage over conventional technology and a sustainable business case. Second, the legal treatment of settlement, liquidity, collateral, custody, insolvency and data access must be certain. Third, privacy, cyber resilience and fallback arrangements must withstand independent scrutiny.
Asset tokenisation may widen access to savings and investment for the unbanked and underserved, including access to small portions of eligible securities rather than whole units. But this fractional access is not inclusion by itself. Customers still need appropriate products, clear disclosure, safe custody, fair pricing, simple onboarding and effective recourse. We will compare tokenised approaches with conventional alternatives and proceed only where the public benefit is measurable.
Track B can advance through legal analysis, market consultation and narrow experiments, but it will not delay Track A. Our immediate priority is a dependable, inclusive and interoperable way for ordinary value to move quickly today.
JAM-DEX, cash and the singleness of money
Where does JAM-DEX fit? It gives Jamaica practical experience with digital cash. The next stage must focus on active use: more providers, wider merchant acceptance, connections with regulated accounts, practical public-payment use cases and low-connectivity capability. Signing up for a wallet does not mean using it. Adoption means people regularly use JAM-DEX and can spend it where they live, work and recover from disaster.
In shock-responsive payments after a disaster, JAM-DEX can be one payment rail within a wider architecture. But a rapid transfer helps only if the responsible government agency has payment-ready beneficiary data: verified identity details and the correct account or wallet information, not just a list of names. It also requires customer choice, merchants able to accept the instrument, working cash-out and fallback channels, and tested reconciliation and recourse. The government agency decides who qualifies and must be ready to send the money without first having to locate recipients or correct their records; BOJ maintains the resilient payment infrastructure.
Physical cash remains legal tender and a vital fallback. Digital payments can be faster, easier to recover and cheaper to handle, but they depend on power, telecommunications, devices and providers. Cash carries costs and risks of its own, yet it works when networks fail. Our aim is therefore not to eliminate cash, but to give Jamaica more reliable choices.
Inclusion that changes productive lives
Financial inclusion is not a side programme; it is a test of whether modernisation delivers public value. Success will not be measured simply by the number of accounts or wallets. It will be measured by whether a farmer can receive payment without travelling for hours, a small supplier can turn a verified invoice into working capital, a young entrepreneur can build an investable history, and a household can receive rapid support after a shock.
An inclusive payment system must work for the person with a feature phone, the community with weak connectivity and the merchant who still needs a practical cash-in or cash-out option. Onboarding and recourse must be simple and proportionate. For small businesses, payment tools can also create receipts, invoices and cash flow records that, when customers consent and safeguards are strong, help regulated lenders see productive capacity that conventional collateral may miss.
That is where payments become commerce transformation. A payment record can become bankable evidence of turnover. An invoice can become a financing opportunity. A digital identity can reduce the cost of verification. An interoperable network can connect a community business to government procurement, tourism and export value chains. But consent, explainability, correction rights, privacy and human review must travel with the data.
Artificial intelligence promises to improve customer service, compliance, fraud detection and financial management. But the principle is simple: automation must not erase accountability. Before a digital agent can initiate a payment, the system must establish who authorised it, what was intended, how it can be traced and who is responsible when something goes wrong.
The foundations are not optional
Those opportunities will endure only if the foundations are sound. Technology alone will not broaden access. Jamaica also needs clear law, coherent scheme rules, accountable governance, sustainable incentives and skilled institutions. Amendments to the Bank of Jamaica’s payment, clearing and settlement legislation, together with a sound licensing regime for qualified non-bank payment providers and fintechs, are therefore foundational. Without fair and properly governed participation, even a strong platform may fail to reach the people and firms it is meant to serve.
Our infrastructure must make payment information more useful, not merely move money. Jamaica’s recently adopted ISO 20022 messaging standard gives institutions a richer common language for that information. The technical migration of JamClear-RTGS was an important step. The next is to use structured information on originators, beneficiaries, locations and payment purposes to accelerate processing, reconciliation, compliance and analysis. A standard creates value only when institutions use it.
Supervisory technology and better data can help the Bank detect risks at machine speed, monitor service quality and understand interconnected financial groups. Technology will support, not replace, accountable human judgement. The same principle applies to digital identity and open finance. Use only the data that are lawful and necessary, protect them strongly and give customers genuine control.
We will move in stages. First establish the facts and legal authority. Then confirm that institutions and merchants are ready, security and privacy protections work, the commercial model is sustainable, inclusion is real and recovery has been tested. Consultation will come before commitment, pilots before production and fresh approval before scale.
Guardians in every business
The Bank can guard the system. But the system meets the public at your counters, on your websites, through your payrolls and in your payment instructions. Every member of this Chamber is therefore both a beneficiary of digital commerce and a guardian of trust.
For business leaders, I would reduce these protections to three habits: verify, protect and prepare. Verify changes to supplier details and exceptional payments through a trusted channel. Have a second person check urgent requests. Protect systems with multi-factor authentication, updates and regular staff cyber threat training, and protect customers at the point of sale. Prepare for both a cyberattack and a payment outage, including by testing offline backups.
And know your critical suppliers. Ask how they recover, what happens when a cloud region or telecommunications provider fails, how incidents are reported and what alternative channel remains. Resilience cannot be wholly outsourced. The dependency may belong to a vendor; the responsibility to customers remains yours.
That discipline matters most for MSMEs. A large institution may absorb a fraud loss or outage. A small business may not survive one. Low-cost, interoperable and well-protected payments are therefore not merely a convenience. They are part of enterprise resilience.
A compact with the Chamber
I invite the Jamaica Chamber of Commerce to work with the Bank on four practical priorities. First, a merchant channel to identify payment frictions, test customer experiences and inform scheme rules. Second, digital-safety information for businesses, employees and customers. Third, payment continuity guidance and exercises covering hurricanes, telecommunications failures, cyber incidents and supplier outages. Fourth, an inclusion workstream focused on the economics of digital payment acceptance for small and rural merchants.
Let me be clear: this is not an invitation to endorse a modern payment platform. It is an invitation to help define the problem, supply evidence and test solutions. Before announcing deliverables, our teams should agree the scope, responsibilities, resources, safeguards and measures of success. Good governance begins by distinguishing ambition from approval.
The Chamber can help us answer three practical questions that no central bank can answer alone: where businesses face the greatest cost and delay in accepting or reconciling payments; what would make small and rural merchants adopt digital options; and which common standards or connectivity improvements would make the greatest difference. Evidence from your members can turn a national vision into workable design.
What the Bank will do
Here is what the Bank will do. We will protect price stability, the monetary anchor and the safety of the payment system. We will strengthen oversight, cyber resilience, incident coordination and the legal foundations for properly governed participation. We will assess an integrated fast payment capability, improve the practical usefulness and offline resilience of JAM-DEX, and explore wholesale money innovation only through controlled pilots that do not distract from immediate retail needs. We must also prepare for the next generation of digital risk. As finance becomes more digital, advances in quantum computing could eventually weaken the encryption that protects payments, identities and sensitive data. The Bank will work with industry, regulators and government to strengthen cryptographic resilience and support an orderly transition to quantum-resistant security, before that risk becomes a crisis. And we will publish clear measures of active use, reliability, cost, inclusion and business outcomes, because progress must be demonstrated, not announced.
Closing: trust in motion
When this Chamber was founded in 1779, commerce moved by sailing ship and handwritten ledger. Today, value crosses the world in seconds, and a thief need not leave his chair. The tools have changed, but commerce still rests on sound money, enforceable obligations, reliable infrastructure and trust between people who may never meet.
Jamaica can move now, drawing on battle-tested central bank digital currency experience, established settlement infrastructure, a sophisticated financial sector, energetic fintech and business communities, and development partners ready to help test the future. Melissa’s hard lessons and today’s cyber risks remind us neither to rush blindly nor wait passively.
It is worth repeating that if we succeed, a payment can become a business record, a bridge to credit, a lifeline after disaster and a trusted connection to a wider market. Small merchants will have affordability and safety; households will not be excluded by basic phones or remote communities. Financial institutions will innovate while preserving settlement finality and soundness, and the Jamaican dollar will remain the stable, sovereign anchor of an increasingly digital economy.
The Bank will keep prices stable, the financial system sound and payments safe, inclusive, resilient and modern. The Chamber will continue to connect business, facilitate trade and give commerce its voice. Together, we can ensure that when the next shock comes, whether on the wind, through a wire or from a distant market, Jamaican commerce keeps moving and Jamaicans keep their trust in their money.
Thank you.
