Financial technology companies are moving into Caribbean banking without facing the same regulatory requirements or tax obligations as traditional financial institutions — and a global union federation that has just completed a four-country Caribbean tour is sounding the alarm about who is paying the price.
An Uneven Playing Field
UNI Global Union raised the concern during the final stop of its Caribbean visit in Antigua and Barbuda, where Americas Regional Secretary Marcio Monzane warned that the unchecked rise of fintech represents a growing threat not only to banking workers but to the fundamental fairness of the region's financial sector.
"In the banking industry, there is a shift from a traditional bank into a finance technology industry that they are taking over part of the business, even without proper regulation," Monzane said. "They're not paying the same tax that the banks are paying, so there is a huge discussion on this."
The concern is straightforward: fintech companies are competing directly with traditional banks for customers and market share, while operating in a regulatory grey zone that exempts them from many of the compliance, licensing, and tax obligations that established financial institutions must meet. That asymmetry, UNI argues, creates an uneven playing field that disadvantages banks, their workforces, and by extension the national and regional economies that depend on a stable, properly regulated financial sector.
Digitalisation and the Human Cost
UNI Americas Regional Vice President Trevor Johnson pointed to the rapid digitalisation already underway among major regional banks as evidence of how quickly the transformation is happening — and how far it has outpaced the ability of Caribbean legislatures to respond.
Johnson cited the example of a major regional bank that introduced what it described as a fully digitised branch in Trinidad designed to minimise human interaction, routing customers toward machines and online platforms. For banking workers — many of whom are represented by union affiliates across the Caribbean — every ATM that replaces a teller and every app that replaces a branch visit represents a direct threat to employment.
He noted that the pace of that transformation has left workers without adequate legal protection as the sector evolves around them, and that the challenge is compounded by the multinational structure of many regional banks, which make decisions at the regional or global level that ripple across multiple Caribbean jurisdictions simultaneously — each with its own legislative framework and varying degrees of worker protection.
