JAMAICA has singlehandedly transformed the Caribbean stock market. Irreversibly. Behind the titanic transformation stands a diminutive, yet gigantic figure – Dr. Marlene Street Forest. She bestrides the financial sub-sector “like a Colossus”.
It was the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who counselled the world advising that, ‘If you want something said, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman”.
Certainly, Jamaica wanted “something done” in their stock market sector and wisely turned to a woman about 25 years ago.

And the transformation led by Dr Street Forrest, Managing Director (MD) of the Jamaica Stock Exchange (JSE). has been magical. Her exceptional insight and foresight in leading the charge was noted by an American firm during an interview five years ago. They characterised the Land of Reggae then as the “Home of the World’s Best Performing Stock Market.”
In 2019 when the interview with the JSE Managing Director was conducted the firm’s interviewer described the Jamaican stock market as “so obscure, even emerging-markets funds don’t go there.”

Nevertheless, the interviewer noted that although nascent market funds avoid participation, the JSE still was “booming”. Driving that flourishing, still, is Dr. Marlene Street Forrest, architect of its local, Regional and global influence, and beneficiary of all the hardships, vagaries and victories over her years there at the helm.
She has witnessed all of these, and more, as a front-seat viewer Street Forest noted in an interview with Business View Caribbean (BVC).

“Over the years, we have expanded our services to the market. At the time I came, we started doing electronic trading and settlement. We now have the Jamaica Stock Exchange and its subsidiary, the Jamaica Central Securities Depository Limited, along with its subsidiary called the JCSD Trustee Services. To ensure we offer full services to our investors and member dealers, we expanded the JCSD to offer registrar services and, based on the subsidy, trustee services,” she reportedly told BVC.

At this year’s annual Summit held at The Jamaica Pegasus Hotel, Dr. Street Forrest, in outlining some challenges the JSE faces as it entered 2024, highlighted under-performance as an issue. Notwithstanding this she forecasts more trading involving government securities, a hike in research leading to more attractive packaging and to boost sales and tapping into available global securities. She even promised that emerging companies getting expert advice and assured improvements to the stock exchange infrastructure.

The Titan in the JSE and Caribbean stock market eagerly anticipates financial literacy as a staple in Caribbean schools’ curriculum from primary to all tertiary institutions.
“We are not in many high schools,” Dr Street Forrest lamented during one of the Q&A sessions at this year’s three-day anniversary event held under the 2024 theme ‘The Drivers of Capital: From Concept to Growth’ in her hometown, Kingston, Jamaica.

She plans urging the local education ministry during next week’s October 8-9 Guyana/Jamaica Capital Markets Conference to introduce comprehensive financial education throughout the Guyanese learning system to help demystify the stock market for learners making it much easier for their participation even before their graduation.
Next week’s joint Conference will be held under the theme ‘Financing For Success: Where Passion, Prosperity and People Align’ at the Pegasus Suites and Corporate Centre, Kingston, Georgetown.

During her more than two-decade tenure at the helm of the JSE Dr. Street Forrest has helped diversify the sector by adding to the main market a junior market, the bond market and the UD Dollar equities market. As part of her wide-ranging vision securities are buttressing those markets, and with the aid of technology, adding an online trading platform to have a hand in activities on a global scale.

The JSE MD is showing she possesses a nimble mind by staying current on lightning-fast technological changes targeting the younger generation who today can access JSE’s trading platform and interactive website using either an android or iPhone.
In 2024 she has drifted from that position. She told this year’s annual meeting that, “As active participants in the capital markets, we must quickly adapt innovative technologies, and superior services that surpass customers’ expectations and that yield good returns on investments. We really want to do that when the market is up…to get that real return for investors,” the JSE official emphasised.

However, for Dr. Street Forrest, people must not be sacrificed at the altar of technology. “A key emphasis is recognition for human capital which is a key driver for capital market investment. The continued development of our people encompasses our own aspect of capital market and their intersection with technology is critical to our progress. Also, we knew that confidence in our markets is a responsibility that we bear. Therefore, it is important that we be equipped with analytical minds so that we can drive the process of even AI (artificial intelligence),” she said.

More than a decade and a half ago she also helped mastermind tectonic shifts within the JSE moving it from a mutual company to a demutualised Exchange making the regulatory division independent from its commercial compatriot with a self-governing Board of Directors providing much-valued oversight. “That ensures the maturity of the market and allows us to lead by example in terms of transparency and to bring more confidence in the market,” she explained in the BVC conversation.

The MD is steadfast in her beliefs in good governance; she remains upbeat too about luring more listed companies to participate in the JSE, and she still aches for students to develop a sixth sense about the workings of the stock market discovering it through games they have created expressly for that purpose.
Among the hallmarks of Dr Street Forrest’s more-than-two-decade stewardship at the JSE is protecting the institution from incestuous inbreeding. The award-winning Kingston stock exchange has remained “outward looking with a global footprint” according to her.

It is holding on to the value and confidence circumspectly nurtured in its 54-year existence by continuing to provide “efficient service to the market and the outward looking strategy is that with each transaction we are working to be that place where our footprint is on every capital market transaction” Dr Street Forrest said in the BVC interview some five years ago. That still holds true today.
Don’t let the diminutive stature, sartorial elegance and infectious laughter blind you to the fact that hidden beneath labyrinth of all of these in Shaggy’s globally popular song is ‘the strength of a woman’. That woman is Dr. Marlene Street Forrest who will retire at the end of 2024.