CIBC has be­come the lat­est bank to de­crease the for­eign ex­change us­age lim­it on its deb­it card hold­ers in T&T.

In a no­tice to cus­tomers, the bank said from Feb­ru­ary 10, 2025, CIBC said it would be im­ple­ment­ing re­vised for­eign ex­change us­age lim­its as a re­sult of on­go­ing for­eign cur­ren­cy sup­ply con­straints in the lo­cal mar­ket.

The new month­ly forex us­age lim­its will be cat­e­gorised by deb­it card prod­uct and will re­duce from US$1,000 a month to US$ 500 for per­son­al ac­count Visa deb­it cards.

In Oc­to­ber last year Sco­tia­bank an­nounced that from De­cem­ber 1, cus­tomers with per­son­al cred­it cards, with the ex­cep­tion of the Aero Mas­ter­card Black, will have a re­duced max­i­mum lim­it of US$2,000.

Ac­cord­ing to the Cen­tral Bank, a to­tal of US$6.2 bil­lion worth of for­eign ex­change was sold to the pub­lic by au­tho­rised deal­ers in 2023, mark­ing a 4.9 per cent de­crease com­pared to the pre­vi­ous year. Of that amount, US$2.18 bil­lion was cred­it card trans­ac­tions, the Cen­tral Bank stat­ed in its lat­est An­nu­al Eco­nom­ic Sur­vey for 2023.

On Sep­tem­ber 21, 2023 Re­pub­lic Bank re­duced its cus­tomers' US-dol­lar cred­it card lim­it from US$10,000 to US$5,000.

Last No­vem­ber, Roy­al Bank of Cana­da (RBC) an­nounced a 66 per cent re­duc­tion in the for­eign ex­change (forex) lim­its on its per­son­al and busi­ness bank­ing cred­it cards.

Cred­it-card hold­ers' month­ly lim­its re­duced from ap­prox­i­mate­ly $41,000 (US$6,020) to $14,000 (US$2,058).