- All three ABM regions reported 100% operational availability in May 2025.
- National system uptime fell to 90.9% despite full operational readiness.
- Scotia Bank adds ‘denomination mix initiative’ to its growing list of downtime drivers.
- Only the Rural region missed the 95% uptime target, recording 94.5%.
- Other Urban recovered strongly to 97.3% uptime after months of vandalism disruption.
- Average recovery time rose to 3.2 hours nationally, driven by rural delays.
May 2025 produced a paradox in Jamaica’s ATM data: all three of the island’s administrative regions reported 100% operational availability — meaning every deployed machine was technically in service — yet national uptime fell to 90.9% as Scotia Bank’s compounding maintenance and operational initiatives continued to drag on the time those machines were actually available to customers.
Jamaica’s Automated Banking Machine network deployed 905 machines in May 2025 with 870 recorded as operational — a national operational rate of 96.1% — but achieved only 90.9% system uptime against the Bank of Jamaica’s 95% minimum standard, according to the ABM Performance Report for May 2025. What makes May’s bulletin distinctive is the regional breakdown: for the first time in the recent reporting series, all three regions — the Kingston Metropolitan Area, Other Urban, and Rural — returned 100% operational availability at the regional level, a strong recovery on operational deployment that stands in direct contrast to the persistently below-target uptime figures. The KMA recorded 96.3% uptime and Other Urban rebounded sharply to 97.3%, but Rural fell to 94.5% — just below the 95% minimum — and the national 90.9% average reflects the continuing drag from Scotia Bank’s multi-front maintenance programme.
A New Chapter in the Scotia Bank Saga: The Denomination Mix Initiative
Bank of Nova Scotia Jamaica Limited’s explanation for May’s downtime introduced a new element not seen in preceding months: the “continuation of its cash note denomination mix initiative.” This refers to a bank-led programme to restructure the balance of note denominations loaded into its ATM cash cassettes — adjusting the ratio of J$100, J$500, J$1,000, and J$5,000 notes dispensed per transaction to better match the evolving withdrawal patterns of its customer base. The bank also cited the continuing parts remediation on its deposit machines and unplanned dispenser, power, and telecommunication issues as additional contributors to May’s downtime.
The denomination mix initiative is a more operationally subtle form of disruption than vandalism or mechanical remediation. Changing the cassette configuration of ATMs requires machines to be taken temporarily offline for reprogramming and physical cassette reconfiguration — a process that, if rolled out across many machines simultaneously, creates a synchronised pattern of brief but widespread outages rather than prolonged outages at individual sites. From a customer experience perspective, the effect is similar: a machine is unavailable when you need it, regardless of whether the reason is vandalism, a broken part, or a planned denomination reconfiguration. From a regulatory perspective, however, a denomination initiative is a legitimately commercial decision that the BOJ’s uptime monitoring framework captures but does not necessarily penalise differently from unavoidable faults.
The denomination mix initiative also reflects a broader operational reality in Jamaica’s cash economy: the appropriate mix of notes in an ATM varies significantly by location, time of day, and customer profile. A machine serving a low-income rural community may need a higher proportion of J$100 and J$500 notes; a machine in a commercial district or an airport may need more J$1,000 and J$5,000 notes to serve higher-value withdrawal requests efficiently. Getting the denomination mix right reduces the frequency of “out-of-cash” events for specific denominations — one of the most common causes of effective machine unavailability that does not always show up as a formal “downtime” event in performance statistics. Scotia Bank’s initiative may ultimately improve customer experience and reduce cash-replenishment frequency, but achieving this requires the short-term cost of reconfiguration downtime that now appears in May’s uptime figures.
Regional Reversal: Other Urban Recovers Strongly
The most significant shift in May’s regional data is the recovery of the Other Urban zone, which had been the most consistently disrupted region since February. After recording uptime of 91.2% in February, 89.1% in March, and 90.9% in April — all materially below the minimum standard — Other Urban bounced back to 97.3% uptime in May, the highest reading of any region in the month. The recovery from below-standard to well-above-standard in a single month suggests that the vandalism-related repair backlog that had been accumulating since February has been substantially resolved, at least temporarily, and that the remaining Scotia Bank disruptions are now concentrated in the rural estate rather than the Other Urban network.
Other Urban’s recovery time at 3.7 hours — the highest of any region — is curious against the backdrop of a 97.3% uptime reading. A high recovery time with high uptime means that when machines did fail in Other Urban in May, they took longer than usual to fix, but they failed rarely enough that the total cumulative downtime remained well below the threshold. This is consistent with a pattern in which the remaining downtime events in Other Urban during May were complex technical faults requiring specialist intervention rather than the simpler vandalism repairs or part replacements that dominated February-April.
The Kingston Metropolitan Area continued its recovery trajectory from March’s low, recording 100% operational machines, 96.3% uptime, and a 2.6-hour average recovery time. KMA’s performance in May is the strongest it has been since January and reflects both the completion of the most acute phase of remediation in the capital and the concentration of technical support resources that makes KMA the fastest-recovering region when faults do occur. With KMA at 96.3% and Other Urban at 97.3%, both above the 95% minimum, the national underperformance is now exclusively attributable to Rural underperformance and whatever residual Scotia Bank network issues persist at that level.
Rural Remains the Persistent Challenge
The Rural region’s 94.5% uptime — marginally below the 95% threshold — is the sole regional non-compliance figure in May’s bulletin. This represents a slight improvement on April’s 89.1% rural uptime but remains the region’s fifth consecutive month below the minimum standard in 2025. Recovery time in the rural zone averaged 3.0 hours in May, the same as the national average and slightly longer than KMA’s 2.6 hours, reflecting the persistent logistics challenges of getting spare parts and technical personnel to geographically dispersed rural ATM sites in a timely manner.
The structural nature of rural ABM underperformance — driven by power reliability, connectivity constraints, distance from technical support, and the economics of cash-replenishment logistics in low-footfall communities — means that closing the rural-urban performance gap requires solutions that go beyond simply servicing individual machines faster. Reliable generator backup power for rural machines, improved mobile connectivity at remote sites, regional spare-parts depots that reduce logistical response times, and cash management contracts structured around rural replenishment frequency would all contribute to a more durable improvement in rural uptime performance. These are infrastructure investments that cost money and require coordination between commercial banks, the BOJ, and in some cases utilities and telecommunications providers — but they are the interventions required to bring rural uptime to the same standard that urban consumers take for granted.
The Paradox of 100% Operational, 90.9% Uptime
May 2025’s distinction between 100% operational availability at the regional level and 90.9% national uptime is a useful illustration of the difference between these two metrics. “Operational availability” as reported in the regional breakdown refers to whether machines are physically in service and not permanently out of order — essentially, whether they are switched on and assigned to duty. “Uptime” refers to the fraction of time during which those operational machines were actually available to process customer transactions without interruption. A machine can be “operational” but experience intermittent outages — for denomination reconfiguration, cash replenishment, software updates, brief power fluctuations, or connectivity drops — each of which contributes to a lower uptime percentage without necessarily triggering an “outage” designation in the operational count.
This distinction matters for policy and for consumers. The BOJ’s 95% uptime standard is designed to ensure that machines are genuinely available to customers throughout business hours on most days of the month — not just that they are nominally in service while intermittently unavailable. May’s 90.9% national uptime, despite all-region 100% operational deployment, shows that meeting the deployment standard does not automatically translate to meeting the availability standard. As Scotia Bank’s remediation, denomination initiatives, and infrastructure challenges continue to generate brief but frequent outages, the cumulative effect on uptime will remain a compliance challenge even as the machines themselves remain physically in place and nominally operational.
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