The directors of Renozan Limited gathered on May 28 for a Q2 board session that insiders say locked in the company’s most aggressive growth play to date: an island-wide surge of its flat-fee Tap-to-Pay terminals aimed at uprooting the high-cost devices still parked on most Jamaican counters.
Behind the polished glass doors at The Hub, the mood was all business. Executives pored over rollout timelines, merchant conversion rates, and the first tranche of data showing terminal adoption comfortably ahead of projections. One attendee summed up the meeting in a single sentence: “We stopped discussing possibilities and started assigning finish lines.”
Yet as Renozan accelerates, questions are mounting outside the boardroom.
Supporters’ view: With 1,200 merchants already live and a pipeline of supermarkets and pharmacies queued for installation, backers argue that Renozan is building an end-to-end payments railroad the legacy banks simply can’t match. By anchoring every transaction to its own device, wallet, and settlement rails, the firm is poised to fold loans, cross-border transfers, and card issuing into a single merchant relationship—cutting banks out of both revenue and relevance.
Skeptics’ warning: Industry analysts counter that Jamaica’s unregulated fintech terrain could funnel Renozan back toward the incumbents it is trying to eclipse. “You can innovate around fee structures all day,” notes one Kingston compliance consultant, “but the minute the regulators tighten payments oversight, you need banking partners with deep capital and a national licence. That will dilute Renozan’s leverage and slow its expansion curve.”
Inside Renozan, executives acknowledge the regulatory gap but frame it as temporary leverage rather than a looming trap. One director familiar with the May 28 discussions said the board is “open to alliances that extend reach but allergic to terms that undercut the flat-fee promise.” Translation: partner only if control of pricing and data stays in-house.
In the meantime, the numbers tell their own story; pilot merchants report average transaction-cost savings north of 40 percent. For businesses that have long paid percentage fees on every swipe, Renozan’s fixed JMD 10 per sale is proving hard to ignore.
Whether the digital bank can keep scaling without surrendering autonomy will hinge on two fronts: Jamaica’s pending fintech rulebook and the appetite of entrenched banks to either collaborate or compete head-on. For now, Renozan is betting that faster execution will outpace both obstacles.
The May 28 board meeting made one thing clear: the company’s playbook is set—and the countdown to a new merchant-payments order has entered its next phase.
