The manager’s office in the Bank of Montserrat has been snug rather than smart for the past few years. When The Banker visited Anton Doldron in October in what looked like a small bedroom on the upper floor of a erstwhile private house at Hilltop, in the north of the island, he was looking forward to moving out of his temporary accommodation. The bank had been occupying it since ash and rocks from the Soufriere volcano in 1995 started to rain down on (and later buried) the original headquarters sited in the centre of Plymouth, the island’s former capital, now abandoned.
The bank’s new green-roofed building down the road at Brades was nearly ready for occupation and Mr Doldron and his operations manager Clifford Lyght were thinking about the move and imagining the luxury of offering clients the services of an ATM, only the second on the 40 square mile island. “It will back up our new loan campaign with reduced interest rates and the introduction of credit card operations we are introducing,” says Mr Doldron, a Trinidadian.
