From Platform to Network: A Regionally Governed Transaction Layer for Caribbean Economies

Small Caribbean economies have historically answered structural external economic pressure through regional integration, pooling legal, monetary and negotiating authority to create standing no member holds alone. As commerce has become digitally mediated, part of that dependency has moved. It no longer sits only in tariffs, preferences and market-access rules, where regional institutions can reach it. It sits increasingly in privately governed financial infrastructure, in the rules determining which lawful commerce is admitted, at what price and on what evidentiary terms. That is a layer most small states do not own and cannot reliably control through domestic law alone. This paper argues that the region holds substantial elements of the relevant institutional and technical base, and that what is absent is a governing layer rather than another component. Several core legal, commercial and technical conditions remain to be tested, and the paper specifies them rather than assuming them away. The unit of construction is an integrated enterprise. Its constitutive transaction service is a regionally governed card scheme: the instrument that establishes a native credential, sets participation rules, exercises commercial-admission authority, and in doing so creates a transaction domain governed under regional law. A reusable platform makes that domain operable, translating regional legal and regulatory requirements into executable identity, compliance, orchestration, processing and settlement controls. Beneath the governed layer, payment and settlement rails, whether owned or partnered, provide the means of movement without acquiring control of the rulebook. The economic proposition is migration and servicing of existing economic activity rather than the creation of new transaction demand. Retail purchase, merchant settlement, payroll, public disbursement, remittance, tourism, business-to-business trade and lawful commerce that the incumbent classification regime currently holds out are all already occurring. The question is through whose infrastructure they occur, and which institutions perform and are paid for the associated functions. Newly enabled commerce is additional rather than foundational. Three economic questions are kept separate throughout and answered separately: whether the scheme operator can sustain itself, whether participating institutions have sufficient incentive to participate, and whether regional ownership produces development value. A positive answer to one is not evidence for the others. Operator break-even is a test of one component, not the organising economic thesis of the enterprise. The principal constraint has shifted from constructing proprietary technical infrastructure toward assembling the institutions, authorisations, certified integrations and committed transaction volume required to operate it. The decisive unresolved question is institutional assembly. Technical implementation, certification, resilience and integration remain substantial work, but no longer appear to be the gating unknown. What this paper asks for is not approval to build. It is a feasibility and design compact: independent legal, technical and financial assessment, followed by pilots subject to pass and fail thresholds agreed in advance.