Six Years In, the Bahamas' Credit Bureau Still Calls Itself a Startup

By Adrian Dunkley, Founder and CEO, StarApple AI | August 31, 2026

A credit bureau that has been operating for six years should not sound like a startup. But that is exactly how the Central Bank of the Bahamas' own governor described it on July 31, 2026, telling the Tribune that the country's credit reporting system, live since January 2020, still "feels as if we're in start-up mode." For a Bahamian consumer or small business owner wondering whether their payment history is actually being recorded anywhere useful, that admission from the regulator overseeing the system is the most direct answer available.

What Governor Rolle Actually Said

Speaking at a press briefing, John Rolle described the bureau's progress as "very positive," while adding the caveat that officials still feel as if they are in start-up mode. Onboarding of new reporting entities, the banks, credit unions, and lenders whose data actually populates the system, remains active work rather than a finished task. Rolle also said the bureau is already delivering value where it has reached: it lets a borrower see, in one consolidated place, what information exists on their credit history, correct inaccuracies, and use that record to negotiate loan terms rather than relying on informal reference letters from a bank manager.

The more pointed line came when Rolle was asked who exactly is being captured by the system so far. "We don't have a very granular view of who those borrowers are," he said, "but in many cases they tend to be larger businesses." That single sentence tells you more about the state of Bahamian credit infrastructure in 2026 than any press release: six years after launch, the file is still weighted toward the borrowers who least need a bureau's help proving they are creditworthy.

From Kickoff Event to Ongoing Build: The Timeline

The legal foundation for the bureau is the Credit Reporting Act, No. 3 of 2018, which gave the Central Bank of the Bahamas supervisory authority over a licensed credit reporting system for the first time. CRIF, an international credit data and analytics company, was selected to build and manage it. The bureau's formal kickoff took place at the British Colonial Hilton in Nassau on January 24, 2020, an event attended by then-Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Peter Turnquest, Governor Rolle, Deputy Inspector Karen Rolle, Clearing Banks Association chairperson Lasonya Missick, and Bahamas Co-operative League president Hilton Bowleg. CRIF's own sales director called it "an important step... toward a new and more advanced credit culture."

Then came the pandemic. The bureau's early years overlapped almost exactly with COVID-19 disruption across the Bahamian economy, and Rolle used the moment to clarify that loan payment deferrals granted during the pandemic should not be recorded as defaults, so borrowers could demonstrate good standing once incomes recovered. That is a reasonable, necessary policy call. It is also part of why, by mid-2026, a system meant to be operational within roughly a year of its 2020 kickoff is instead still described by its own regulator as a work in progress, with CRIF Bahamas holding sessions as recently as late 2025 with Clearing Banks Association members to discuss onboarding progress and introduce new digital onboarding tools.

The Lending Numbers the Bureau Sits On Top Of

The credit conditions surrounding this slow build are, on their face, healthy. The Bahamas' non-performing loan ratio stood at approximately 4.4% as of mid-2026, down roughly a full percentage point from June 2025, a sign that existing borrowers are largely current on what they owe. Commercial lending nearly doubled during the first half of 2026, and private sector lending broadly expanded at a modestly faster pace than the prior year. Those are the numbers of an economy where credit is flowing, at least for the businesses already inside the system.

What those figures do not show is the borrower who is not in the file at all. A bureau still weighted toward larger businesses has little to say about the sole trader running a hardware store in Freeport, or the household in Eleuthera paying rent and utilities on time every month with no formal loan on record. Good macro numbers for the banking sector coexist easily with a thin or invisible credit history for exactly the people a credit bureau exists to help.

Nassau's harbour moves on schedule. The paperwork behind who can borrow to build the next boat still does not.

The 18% the Bureau Was Built to Reach

The Central Bank of the Bahamas has separately estimated that roughly 18% of the population remains unbanked, a figure that lines up with a 2018 IMF study that found a similar share of Bahamian adults outside the formal banking system. That estimate predates the credit bureau's launch and was, in fact, part of the justification for building the Sand Dollar, the Bahamas' central bank digital currency, which went live in 2020 with the explicit goal of extending financial services to people not currently integrated into the banking system. Two flagship financial inclusion projects, a CBDC and a credit bureau, both launched the same year, aimed at overlapping problems, and both still working, six years later, toward full reach.

That 18% figure matters because a credit bureau cannot report a payment history that never touches the formal system in the first place. Someone paying a landlord in cash, buying inventory from a supplier on informal terms, or running a business through a personal bank account rather than a registered one leaves no trail a bureau, however well onboarded, is built to capture. The bureau's start-up-mode onboarding problem and the unbanked share are two sides of the same gap: one is about which institutions report data, the other about which people generate reportable data at all.

"A credit bureau that only sees larger businesses is not measuring creditworthiness. It is measuring who was already big enough to be visible before the bureau existed. The people this system was built for, the small trader, the household with a steady but informal income, are the ones a six-year onboarding curve keeps missing."

- Adrian Dunkley, Founder and CEO, StarApple AI

How the Bahamas Compares to the Rest of the Region

The Bahamas runs its own separate system under CRIF, distinct from the bureaus covering Jamaica, Barbados, Guyana, and the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union, which are operated by EveryData Group. That matters because London-based Creditinfo Group completed its acquisition of EveryData on August 6, 2026, putting one international operator in control of credit reporting infrastructure across four other Caribbean jurisdictions at once. The Bahamas was not part of that deal, and its bureau has had roughly two extra years to mature relative to when EveryData's own bureaus came under Creditinfo's ownership, yet by the Governor's own account it is still earlier in its onboarding curve than the age of the system would suggest.

The pattern of formal bureau coverage lagging actual creditworthiness is not unique to the Bahamas. In Barbados, the Caribbean Development Bank reported on April 14, 2026, that 77% of micro, small, and medium enterprises face financing constraints, despite MSMEs making up more than 96% of the country's formal enterprises, largely because lenders still demand collateral types many small businesses do not hold. The CDB is funding a US$560,000 project to let movable assets like equipment and inventory count as collateral instead. Different country, different mechanism, same underlying story: the formal system undercounts who can actually be trusted to repay.

Where Alternative and AI-Driven Scoring Fits

StarApple AI, the Caribbean's first AI company, has argued consistently that closing this kind of gap requires models built from the start around the financial behaviour a traditional bureau structurally misses, not a bureau modernisation roadmap that eventually gets around to smaller borrowers. Credit Garden's World Credit Score, part of the same network, already includes the Bahamas among the more than 50 countries its underlying model is calibrated for, weighting payment history, debt burden, credit history, income stability, and country-level economic context, sovereign rating, financial infrastructure, and macro stress among them, into a single 200 to 900 score. You can read the fuller case for region-specific AI infrastructure on Adrian Dunkley's own site.

That is not a substitute for what CRIF and the Central Bank are building. A licensed bureau carries legal and regulatory weight an alternative score does not, and onboarding every bank, credit union, and lender properly is worth doing carefully rather than quickly. But a Bahamian small business owner does not have to wait for that onboarding to finish before a model can read their invoices, their supplier payments, or their point-of-sale history and produce a usable picture of risk. The two systems solve overlapping problems on different timelines, and a country does not need to choose only one.

What to Watch Next

Three things are worth tracking through the rest of 2026. First, whether the Central Bank publishes any concrete onboarding milestones, a target number of reporting institutions or a completion date, rather than describing progress only in general terms. Second, whether the National Financial Inclusion Strategy the Central Bank has been drafting explicitly addresses MSME and individual bureau coverage, not just account access. Third, whether the Bahamas' continued 18% unbanked estimate moves at all once fuller bureau data and Sand Dollar adoption figures are compared side by side, since right now the two initiatives are tracked separately rather than as a single measure of financial inclusion progress.

None of that changes what is true today. The Bahamas built the legal and institutional scaffolding for a modern credit bureau in 2018, launched it in 2020, and six years later its own governor says the system still feels like it is starting up. That is not a failure so much as an honest admission, and an honest admission is useful only if it changes what happens next: for the borrower still missing from the file, waiting is not a strategy.

This publication has traced the same pattern across the region, in Jamaica's gap between being banked and being seen and in how ownership changes at four other Caribbean bureaus raise their own governance questions. The Caribbean AI Association has pushed regional governments to treat credit visibility as a financial inclusion metric in its own right, not a side effect of banking access, and the Caribbean AI Risk Management Council has pressed for clear governance whenever a credit system, bureau or AI model alike, expands who it reports on. Organisations building AI capacity market by market, including AI Barbados, are tracking the same collateral and coverage gaps this article describes for Barbados' own MSME sector.

Related reading across the Caribbean AI network