A Record Year for Money Arriving, and Nothing to Show for It
The Inter-American Development Bank released its 2026 remittance figures in June, and the headline number is hard to miss: Latin America and the Caribbean received a record USD 173.7 billion in remittances in 2025, a 7.3% jump over the year before. Money kept flowing into 2026, though the pace eased. First-quarter growth across the wider region was 5.7%, and the Caribbean specifically posted 5.9%, both a step down from the 10.8% growth the Caribbean logged across all of 2025.
Slower growth is still growth, and against a decade-long average the region is still ahead. What makes the figures worth stopping on is not the rate of change. It is what happens to that money once it lands. A household in Kingston, Montego Bay, or Port of Spain receiving a monthly transfer from a relative in Miami, Toronto, or London builds a financial life around that inflow: rent gets paid, a small shop gets stocked, school fees clear on time, savings accumulate in a mobile wallet or a cambio account. Every one of those transactions is evidence of income stability and repayment capacity. None of it, in most cases, ever reaches a credit bureau.
Why the Record Doesn't Register on a Credit File
Credit bureaus score what gets reported to them: loan repayments, credit card statements, mortgage history. A remittance recipient with three years of predictable inflows and a spotless bill-payment record can walk into a bank with a genuinely low-risk profile and come out with a thin file, sometimes no file at all, because nothing about that pattern was ever structured into a reportable event. The World Bank's Global Findex work has shown for years that roughly half of adults across Latin America and the Caribbean have limited or no access to formal financial services. Remittances flowing at record volume into that same population do not change the underlying measurement problem. They make it more visible.
This is the specific failure that alternative credit scoring exists to correct: read the transaction, not the absence of a bureau record. The global market for that approach was valued at USD 5.8 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach USD 19.4 billion by 2034, a compound annual growth rate of 14.4%, according to Dataintelo's market research. Growth at that pace is not a niche correction. It is a signal that lenders, insurers, and fintech platforms increasingly accept transaction history, utility payments, and mobile money activity as legitimate underwriting inputs, not a workaround for markets that lack "real" data.
Jamaica's Regulatory Shift Is the Part Nobody's Talking About
Caribbean port infrastructure: the physical trade rails that open banking and digital payment rails are now being built alongside.
Twin Peaks, Explained Plainly
The Bank of Jamaica has been signalling a move toward a twin peaks regulatory structure, which separates prudential oversight, keeping institutions solvent, from conduct oversight, protecting how products are sold and priced to consumers. That split matters more than it sounds. A single regulator juggling both jobs tends to prioritise solvency during stress and defer conduct questions, including data-sharing consent rules, until calmer conditions return. Splitting the mandate gives conduct regulation, the branch that would eventually own open banking consent standards, room to move on its own timetable instead of waiting behind bank stability concerns.
Digital Disruptor Banks and Jam-Dex
Alongside the twin peaks conversation, Bank of Jamaica leadership has discussed licensing digital disruptor banks and the next phase of Jam-Dex, the country's central bank digital currency. Neither is open banking. Both are the kind of infrastructure that open banking eventually needs: digital-first institutions with API-native architecture from day one, and a settlement rail that doesn't route every transaction through legacy correspondent banking. No Caribbean jurisdiction has published a mandatory open banking technical standard as of mid-2026. What Jamaica is doing is building the pieces that make a standard workable once it arrives.
"Every Caribbean fintech developer I know has stopped waiting for a formal open banking mandate before building. The data access methods available today, consented statement uploads, mobile money APIs, utility payment portals, are unglamorous compared to a clean OAuth flow. They also work right now, for the people who need scoring right now." Lancelot Williams
The Fintech Numbers Behind the Story
Remittances and credit scoring don't sit in isolation. They sit inside a regional fintech sector that is growing faster than most of the institutions built to serve it. The Latin America fintech market was valued at USD 48.7 billion in 2026 and is on a trajectory toward USD 240.2 billion by 2035. The Inter-American Development Bank counts more than 3,000 fintech startups operating across the region, and lending platforms, the segment that lives or dies on credit scoring quality, are its fastest-expanding category, as alternative data increasingly displaces collateral as the basis for small business underwriting.
Set those numbers side by side and the shape of the opportunity gets clear. Record money inflows. A credit scoring industry racing to build tools that can read informal and alternative data. A fintech sector adding lending platforms faster than any other category. The three trends describe the same gap from three different angles: enormous financial activity that the traditional credit system was never built to see.
Where the Credit Garden Score Fits
The Credit Garden Score is built around five weighted components: payment history at 35%, debt burden at 25%, credit history at 15%, income stability at 15%, and regional context at 10%, calibrated against country-specific wage, inflation, unemployment, and financial infrastructure data across more than 50 countries. The score range runs 200 to 900, deliberately mirroring the scale format lenders already recognise, while the underlying calculation adjusts for what "normal" income and debt actually look like in the applicant's own economy rather than benchmarking a Kingston household against a Toronto one.
Income stability and regional context are where the remittance and alternative-data story lands most directly. A model that only reads bureau depth treats a thin file as a blank slate. A model that also weighs income stability against regional wage benchmarks can recognise a household receiving steady transfers, holding a positive account balance, and paying bills on time as exactly what it is: a low-risk profile that the traditional system simply never measured. That is the specific gap alternative credit data and open banking access are built to close, and it is the gap the Credit Garden Score's regional calibration approach was designed to work inside as more of that data becomes accessible to developers.
What This Means for Developers and Lenders Building Now
Waiting for a finished open banking standard before building a Caribbean credit product means waiting past the point where the opportunity is obvious to everyone. The practical path available today includes consented bank statement uploads, mobile money provider APIs where they exist, and utility payment history, all legal under Jamaica's Data Protection Act 2020 and Barbados's Data Protection Act 2019 when proper consent is collected and logged. Every credit decision built on this kind of data needs to be explainable in plain terms to the applicant it affects, and every model needs testing against the possibility that it has learned a proxy for a protected characteristic rather than genuine risk.
None of that is exotic. It is disciplined engineering applied to a market that record remittance flows have made impossible to ignore. The USD 173.7 billion that moved into the region in 2025 was not new money invented by a good year. It was money that has always moved through Caribbean households, now large enough and well-documented enough by the IDB that the gap between what arrives and what a credit file records is difficult to defend as anything other than a measurement failure with a known fix.