Stacy Belnavis has stepped down from PROVEN Bank with an interim CEO running the bank until Cayman’s regulator approves her replacement.
On 17 June, PROVEN Bank informed its customers in Cayman that its CEO, Stacy Belnavis, had resigned. The email stated that the CEO of “PROVEN Group, Johann Heaven, will act in the role of Chief Executive Officer of Proven Bank in the interim until a new Chief Executive Officer is appointed”.
It’s a dramatic turnaround given that Belnavis was only appointed in January 2025. In an 18 June interview with the Compass, Heaven said that Belnavis had told the bank she was leaving “to pursue personal interests”.
Heaven maintained that the transition between CEOs has been managed in an “orderly” fashion. “She was gracious enough to give us the full notice period,” said Heaven, which he confirmed was three months. That gave PROVEN Group time to “go through an extensive recruitment process to interview and appoint a new CEO. We have identified an excellent candidate and we’re now awaiting regulatory approval”.
Heaven was unwilling to share any details on the new CEO before they are officially approved by the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority, but he said that PROVEN is “excited about this appointment”.
Solid base
PROVEN Bank is the smallest of Cayman’s six retail banks – three of which belong to large Canadian banking groups, and only arrived in the jurisdiction with its 2022 acquisition of Fidelity Bank Cayman. But Heaven was keen to emphasise that the bank’s Jamaica Stock Exchange-listed parent company, PROVEN Group, is well capitalised.
“Those banks are on scale a lot bigger than PROVEN, but from a capital adequacy standpoint, meaning your capital as a percentage of your total assets, we are within the regulatory requirements and have excess capital on our balance sheet,” said Heaven.
He noted that PROVEN Group, which was founded as a Saint Lucian entity in 2010, has more than US$1 billion in assets across seven jurisdictions in the Caribbean.
“We are very excited for the future of PROVEN Bank in Cayman, especially with what we have in the pipeline to come over the next couple of months,” said Heaven. “We’ve spent a lot of money over the last couple of months on technology, which we plan to roll out.”
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