- 903 ABMs achieve 95.8% operational share and 93.8% uptime — 2025 highs
- KMA leads with 97.2% operational share and 94.0% uptime
- JMMB Bank records 83.4% uptime — lowest of any institution this month
- NCB Jamaica posts 98.9% uptime, best in the August dataset
- Scotia Bank continues denomination mix initiative in month eight
- CIBC Caribbean recovers to 94.7% operational, 95.1% uptime
Jamaica’s ABM network delivered its strongest combined performance of the 2025 reporting series in August, with national operational share reaching 95.8 per cent and average uptime climbing to 93.8 per cent — the closest to the 95 per cent uptime standard yet achieved — even as JMMB Bank emerged as a new operational concern with the network’s lowest uptime reading of 83.4 per cent.
Of Jamaica’s 903 ABMs during August 2025, 865 were operational, producing a national operational share of 95.8 per cent — up from July’s 95.0 per cent and the highest operational percentage recorded in the current reporting series, according to the Bank of Jamaica’s ABM Performance Report for August 2025. National average uptime rose to 93.8 per cent — up from 91.8 per cent in July and 91.5 per cent in June — representing a sustained multi-month improvement trend that is gradually closing the gap toward the BOJ’s 95 per cent minimum standard. The average recovery time when machines failed was 2.5 hours.
The August results represent a meaningful turning point in the performance trajectory of 2025. Through the first half of the year, uptime figures consistently hovered in the 91 to 92 per cent range, well below the regulatory floor. The three-percentage-point improvement from June to August suggests that remediation efforts across the network are beginning to produce measurable results, even as isolated institutional challenges continue to create pockets of underperformance.
Regional Performance: KMA Leads a Strong Showing Across All Regions
The regional breakdown for August 2025 shows improved performance across all three geographic classifications. The Kingston Metropolitan Area led the pack with a 97.2 per cent operational share and 94.0 per cent uptime, with a recovery time of just 1.8 hours — the fastest in the network. The KMA’s strong result reflects the density of banking infrastructure in the capital and the accessibility of technical support teams in the concentrated urban environment.
Other Urban Areas recorded a 95.1 per cent operational share with 93.7 per cent uptime, though the 3.2-hour average recovery time was the longest among the three regions — suggesting that when machines in secondary commercial centres go offline, the logistical effort required to restore them is meaningfully greater than in the capital. This recovery time gap reflects the reality of Jamaica’s geography: technical staff based in Kingston or other major centres face longer travel times when responding to faults in smaller towns and commercial corridors.
Rural areas matched the Other Urban uptime at 93.8 per cent, with a 94.9 per cent operational share and a 2.4-hour recovery time. The rural uptime of 93.8 per cent — matching the national average and notably higher than the rural figures seen in earlier months of the year — is an encouraging sign for financial inclusion. Cash access for rural Jamaicans depends disproportionately on ABM availability given the lower density of banking branch infrastructure, and an improving uptime trend in rural areas translates directly into better financial access for these communities.
JMMB Bank: The New Performance Concern
The institutional-level data for August 2025 introduces a new name to the network’s list of underperformers: JMMB Bank, which recorded a national uptime of 83.4 per cent — the lowest of any institution in the August dataset and materially below the BOJ’s 95 per cent minimum. Significantly, JMMB Bank achieved 100 per cent operational share on the availability metric, meaning every one of its machines was classified as operational during the month. Yet the 83.4 per cent uptime figure indicates that these operationally-available machines experienced very frequent interruptions — an average of more than one in six minutes of potential service time was lost to downtime.
The divergence between JMMB Bank’s 100 per cent operational share and 83.4 per cent uptime is one of the most striking such gaps in the 2025 reporting series. It illustrates in particularly sharp relief the distinction between the two metrics: a machine can be classified as ‘operational’ in the sense that it is physically available and not flagged as non-functional, yet still deliver poor service continuity if it experiences frequent, short-duration outages throughout its operating hours. The Bank of Jamaica’s decision to publish both metrics is precisely what makes this kind of discrepancy visible, and the JMMB Bank result in August will likely attract regulatory and public attention.
The specific causes of JMMB Bank’s August uptime shortfall are not detailed in the public bulletin, and the institution had not previously featured in the downtime narratives of earlier months in the series. Whether August represents an isolated incident or the beginning of a pattern will become clear in the September and October reports.
CIBC Caribbean Recovers; Scotia Bank Persists
CIBC Caribbean, which fell below the 90 per cent operational threshold in both Kingston and Other Urban areas in July, showed meaningful recovery in August. The institution recorded a 94.7 per cent operational share nationally and a 95.1 per cent uptime — above the BOJ’s minimum uptime standard. The 3.1-hour average recovery time remains relatively high, but the operational and uptime improvements demonstrate that CIBC Caribbean’s July difficulties were likely a temporary condition that has been addressed, at least partially.
Bank of Nova Scotia Jamaica recorded 100 per cent operational share and a 93.1 per cent uptime in August, along with a 2.9-hour average recovery time. The bulletin notes that August downtime stemmed from “ongoing parts remediation due to continued high usage, continuation of its denomination mix initiative, as well as general dispenser and deposit jams” — language that has appeared in every monthly report since February 2025, making August the eighth consecutive month that Scotia Bank’s denomination mix initiative has featured as a cause of ABM disruption. The continued presence of this initiative in the report, after more than half a year, raises questions about its completion timeline and whether the improvement in uptime seen nationally is being dampened by Scotiabank’s ongoing programme.
High Performers Set the Standard
National Commercial Bank Jamaica delivered exceptional performance in August, recording 100 per cent operational share with a 98.9 per cent uptime and an average recovery time of just 0.4 hours — meaning that when NCB ABMs did experience issues, they were typically restored within 24 minutes on average. This result demonstrates that near-perfect uptime is achievable within Jamaica’s infrastructure environment, and sets a benchmark against which all other institutions in the network can be measured.
Sagicor Bank recorded 100 per cent operational share with 96.3 per cent uptime (above the BOJ’s standard) and a 1.2-hour recovery time. Victoria Mutual posted 92.9 per cent operational share with an impressive 97.6 per cent uptime and a 0.6-hour recovery time — a combination that shows excellent machine availability for those that were operational, even with some machines non-operational during the period. JN Bank, which had struggled with an 87.0 per cent uptime in June, has recovered strongly with 100 per cent operational share and 95.7 per cent uptime in August. First Global Bank posted 99.1 per cent operational share and 95.1 per cent uptime.
38 Non-Operational Machines: Continued Progress
The 38 non-operational machines in August represents a further improvement from July’s 45 and June’s 58. The trend of declining non-operational counts across consecutive months — from 58 in June, to 45 in July, to 38 in August — is consistent with the broadly improving operational performance data and suggests that the remediation efforts underway across the network are gradually bearing fruit. Restoring 20 previously non-operational machines to service over two months is a meaningful contribution to the accessibility of Jamaica’s cash infrastructure.
Approaching the Uptime Standard: A Fragile Progress
August’s 93.8 per cent national uptime is the highest recorded in the 2025 series and closes the gap to the 95 per cent standard to just 1.2 percentage points — closer than at any prior point in the year. Whether this progress is consolidated in September and beyond will depend on whether the improvements at recovering institutions are sustained, whether new concerns like JMMB Bank’s 83.4 per cent result are resolved quickly, and whether the long-running Scotia Bank denomination mix programme finally reaches completion.
The August data provides measured encouragement: the network is trending in the right direction on both operational share and uptime. The challenge is to close the remaining gap to the regulatory standard while managing the inevitable emergence of new institutional challenges in a network of 903 machines spread across the full geographic range of Jamaica’s parishes, from the corporate areas of Kingston to the most rural communities of St Elizabeth and Portland.
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