Oceanic Bank and Trust Limited, a progressive private wealth management bank headquartered in Nassau, The Bahamas, has taken a further innovative step by recently acquiring the international trust and corporate management business booked through Barbados from PricewaterhouseCoopers, the worldﾒs largest accountancy firm. This new business will be administered by Oceanicﾒs wholly owned subsidiaries, St Michael Trust Corp and Oceanic Bank and Trust (Barbados) Limited, both based in Barbados and managed by Jim Knott and his Barbados based team. Jim is an international career banker, who has worked in The Bahamas for 11 years and then in Barbados for the past 10 years. In addition to the corporate head office located at TK House, Bayside Executive Park, Nassau and a Freeport Branch Office, Grand Bahama, Oceanic has a marketing office in Covent Garden, London servicing financial intermediaries throughout Europe.
Bruce Bell, Oceanicﾒs Managing Director said, “Oceanicﾒs goal is to become the premier provider of wealth management solutions in the Caribbean and we see the acquisition of the Barbados business as representing another major step in this direction. This acquisition will provide us with business that is highly complementary with our core Bahamian business. Barbados, as a jurisdiction, has concentrated on the development of tax treaty related business and we now find
ourselves in the enviable position of having operations in The Bahamas, a zero tax jurisdiction and Barbados, a tax treaty jurisdiction. Often there will be flow through from the taxed entity
to a non-taxed entity, so we are confident that the Oceanic (Groups) in Barbados and The Bahamas will benefit from each others “business base.”
Wayne Fields, Partner, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Barbados had this to say, “Our decision to sell our trust and some of our corporate management business to Oceanic was dictated by PwC Global because of perceived conflicts of interest and we are pleased to say that the transfer of this business to Oceanic has been achieved with minimal disruption to the clients. In our dealings with Oceanic, we have found them to be highly professional, client focused and are confident that they will be a valuable addition to the expanding Barbados financial services community. We look forward to maintaining the close professional working relationship that has been developed over the months of negotiation and wish Oceanic well in this new venture.”
Oceanic was incorporated in The Bahamas in 1982 and provides a full range of private wealth management and banking services to its international client base.
