Jamaica needs co-operative banks
customers as much as they can at the highest possible price.
The best way to illustrate this effect is to look at the breadand-butter business of banks – the interest spread or difference between what they pay their customers on savings (usually not so much) and what they take from them on their loans (usually more).
Central bank numbers indicate that privately owned commercial banks have been paying on average less than one per cent on savings accounts in the past, while charging on average more than 16 per cent on loans. JN and VMBS pay their customers more on their savings and charge much less on their loans (on average not more than nine per cent).
The average interest spread of privately owned banks is almost double that of co-