Citi asserted its leadership in the Caribbean in 2025 by executing some of the region’s most consequential sovereign and cross-border transactions as global investors cautiously returned to smaller frontier markets. The bank wins the award for Investment Bank of the Year in the Caribbean for converting decades of regional presence into decisive market share in the Dominican Republic and Jamaica, and for setting the pace in a year when deal flow rewarded precision over volume.
Pablo Del Valle, head of Central America and the Caribbean at Citi, points to the firm’s long footprint as a decisive advantage. Citi has operated in the region for seven decades and maintains offices in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago and the Bahamas, while recently opening a representative office in Guyana as offshore energy investment accelerates.
That platform has delivered results. “The past year was spectacular for us in the Caribbean and Central America,” he says. “It was the third year in a row that we have posted double-digit growth in the region.”
Momentum was most visible in sovereign capital markets, where demand for Caribbean credits rebounded as inflation eased and expectations for US interest-rate cuts strengthened. Citi served as joint bookrunner on the Dominican Republic’s landmark dual-currency bond offering and tender offer in February, totaling $3 billion in US-dollar bonds alongside DOP125 billion in local-currency issuance.
The transaction ranked among the most significant sovereign financings in Latin America in 2025. It combined new issuance with a liability management exercise to smooth the country’s maturity profile and reduce refinancing risk. Public deal data show strong participation from US and European institutional investors, confirming that the Dominican Republic had re-established durable access to international markets after several volatile years.
The deal also reinforced the country’s strategy of building a local-currency yield curve while maintaining access to hard-currency funding.
For Citi, the Dominican Republic transaction underscored its ability to execute complex, multi-currency sovereign financings in markets that demand tailored structuring and sustained investor engagement.
Del Valle says the resurgence in activity reflects a broader shift in how global investors view the region.
“Global investors have shown ever more interest in the region,” he says. “This has taken the shape of both traditional purchases of assets in Jamaica and the Dominican Republic and passive investments by international funds in equity and debt issued by local entities. The stability of several economies in the region is helping to boost this movement.”
Macroeconomic trends support that view. Jamaica has benefited from fiscal consolidation and falling debt ratios, while the Dominican Republic has sustained growth driven by tourism and nearshoring. Multilateral data show several Caribbean economies outperformed larger Latin American peers in 2024 and 2025.
Scale, long a constraint for Caribbean capital markets, is also beginning to shift.
“Another element is scale, which starts to become a reality. It has been hard to bring foreign investment to the Caribbean because investments in the region are historically small,” Del Valle says. “But countries have grown and we are getting to the point where there is enough scale to bring investments more consistently.”
Citi has benefited from rising cross-border investment as regional corporates expand and foreign buyers pursue productive assets, particularly in Jamaica’s financial services and infrastructure sectors.
Looking ahead, Citi expects the Caribbean to gain traction from shifting supply chains and easing global financial conditions.
“We see our clients buying more assets than they are selling,” Del Valle says. “But we are also seeing foreign investments in productive assets in the region.”
He adds that a more accommodative interest-rate environment will strengthen corporate confidence.
“We anticipate an environment where interest rates will be less tight than they have been historically, and big businesses in Central America and the Caribbean know their strengths very well,” he says. “They tend to focus on areas such as manufacturing and distribution and they are willing to bet on their strengths in larger markets.”