The Bahamas - A Land Of Innovators

The Heilmeier Catechism, the revolutionary checklist that DARPA, the American Government agency that spawned the Internet (originally called Arpanet), has been using throughout its successful career of innovation, poses several questions that forces one to rethink their objectives to take transformative action and how they hope to achieve them.

What are you trying to do? Articulate your objectives using absolutely no jargon. What is new in your approach and why do you think it will be successful? What are the consequences of doing nothing? How much will it cost? How long will it take? Who needs to be involved to ensure success? Bahamian financial services innovators are employing this same approach and causing disruptive change in many areas of what is a mature and significant pillar of the nation’s economy.

Indeed, the theme of innovation is the dominant one in this report. The rewards of being ‘first to market’ are huge, but they come at a cost – the cost of constant experimentation, failure, recalibration and a humble acceptance of uncertainty throughout the process. This is a cost that many successful Bahamian financial firms gladly pay to maintain their status as trailblazers – and they are right to do so.

Top executives at Bahamian wealth-management firms know that when change efforts experience some resistance, it is a sign that innovation is happening and in such instances, innovators are not afraid of offering their concepts up for scrutiny. More often than not, the experience of a challenge or setback ushers in the next brainwave, or prompts the evolution of an existing concept, leading eventually to success. Some Bahamian firms take inspiration from Amazon’s ‘working backwards’ method, which starts by imagining the first day of a new wealth offering and only then works out the steps that might lead up to it. It is in crucibles such as these that sparks fly, and winning strategies are forged. It is against this backdrop that service providers focus on meeting bespoke client needs. There is no one-size-fits-all approach.

The Bahamas – ever-keen to dominate new trends in financial services – is also promoting a green agenda through financial initiatives designed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and pave the way for a low-carbon economy, through blue-carbon initiatives that finance ecosystems that sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and through carbon trading. The government is, additionally, developing a regime for sovereign carbon credits and the registration of carbon exchanges and related businesses. Last November at COP27, the global climate conference, the Bahamian Prime Minister told world leaders: “Let’s Get Real”.

Meanwhile, the islands’ investment industry is paying more and more attention to Environmental, Social, and Governance-related (ESG) matters, although its regulators have not yet made ESG reporting a top priority.