JAMAICA | Robinson Declares JAM-DEX a Failure, Urges BOJ to Build Pix-Style Payment Rails

The Opposition finance spokesman used the debate on the Virtual Assets Service Providers Bill to say the central bank digital currency has failed by design. He called for the Bank of Jamaica to become the operator of an open national payments network.

KINGSTON, Jamaica, September 30, 2026 - Calvin G Brown — Opposition Spokesman on Finance Julian Robinson has declared JAM-DEX, Jamaica’s central bank digital currency, a failure. He is calling for a new structure in which the Bank of Jamaica (BOJ) stops acting only as the issuer of digital money and instead runs the national payment network that money travels on.

Robinson made the charge in the House of Representatives on Tuesday, during the debate on the Government’s Virtual Assets Service Providers Bill. He described JAM-DEX as “the clearest possible demonstration of what happens when digital money is issued without an open network to circulate it.”

He cited the evidence. Circulation stands below 0.1 per cent of currency in issue. There have been no redemptions. Only two wallet providers operate, and there is no merchant acceptance network. Banks, he said, treat JAM-DEX as a zero-fee substitute for their own deposits and “have little commercial reason to promote it.”

“The failure is not technological. It is a design error in the incentive structure.” — Julian Robinson

That error, he argued, was leaving wallet distribution and merchant acceptance to individual providers instead of building them as shared public infrastructure. He summed up the outcome in one phrase: JAM-DEX has become “currency without a network.”

The Government has rejected that assessment in the past. In March 2025, after Robinson told the Standing Finance Committee that the initiative was dead, Finance Minister Fayval Williams said JAM-DEX was “alive and well” and blamed the slow uptake on problems on the merchant side.

The new structure

Robinson’s alternative draws on Brazil’s Pix and India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI), both run on open rails operated by the state. Pix reaches more than 180 million users, and person-to-person transfers are free. UPI processed 172.2 billion transactions in 2024, which he said was more than every fast payment system in eleven Latin American and Caribbean countries combined. Both work, he said, because “the central bank operates open rails, participation is broad, and the fee structure creates a commercial incentive for banks and merchants to join.”

Under his proposal, the BOJ would move “from CBDC issuer to national payment infrastructure operator.” It would build Pix- and UPI-style rails on which JAM-DEX, licensed stablecoins and regulated virtual assets could all circulate. The system would be free for individuals. A merchant discount rate of 0.4 to 0.5 per cent would be introduced in a second phase, with part of that revenue set aside to bring merchants in underserved communities onto the network. He also suggested a benchmark fee of J$0.005 per transaction.

He argued that Jamaica already has several of the building blocks: a real-time gross settlement system integrated with the CBDC platform since 2022, the BOJ’s FinTech Regulatory Sandbox, and a legislative opening in the current revision of the Payment, Clearing and Settlement Act. He proposed a two-year pilot through the sandbox, with full operation within 36 months. Jamaica, he said, could become “the first Caribbean jurisdiction with open digital payment infrastructure.”

“Rules without scale”

Robinson linked the JAM-DEX critique to the Bill before the House. If JAM-DEX is “currency without a network,” he said, the VASP Bill as drafted amounts to “rules without scale”: a private market with a regulatory framework but no incentives for adoption.

Williams, who opened the debate on September 22, said anyone running a virtual asset business that serves Jamaicans must hold a Financial Services Commission licence, wherever in the world the business is based. She said licensed providers would carry the same anti-money laundering duties as banks. Robinson did not dispute the need to meet Financial Action Task Force standards. His objection was that the Bill is almost entirely defensive and makes no commitment to jobs, investment or domestic technical capacity.

He listed features he said “filter out startups and select for incumbency.” Each of six licence classes must be licensed separately. Local presence rules apply regardless of a firm’s size. There is no sandbox or provisional licence, and there are no dedicated rules for stablecoins or for tokenising real-world assets. He is seeking seven amendments, among them a dual-purpose clause obliging the regulator to promote innovation alongside financial integrity, and tiered capital requirements modelled on the European Union’s MiCA regime.

“The cumulative effect is not a regulated industry. It is a licensing gate that admits firms large enough to absorb the cost of entry.” — Julian Robinson

The cannabis warning

The trade-off is real. Looser entry rules carry supervisory risk at a time when Jamaica’s standing with international standard-setters matters. On Robinson’s argument, tighter rules push the activity offshore, and he noted that the BOJ’s own National Risk Assessment confirms that is already where the activity sits.

“The Act should not proceed in its current form without amendment,” he said. Otherwise, he warned, “Jamaica risks repeating the cannabis experience: a policy that satisfies international obligations on paper while the industry it claims to want never materialises.”

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