Monique Broughton: JN Bank’s People Magnet in Canada

Monique Broughton remembers well her adolescent years tuning into the nightly TV news. Local and international affairs, sports and weather, all easy enough to follow. The finance segment, however, was another matter entirely.

“I would see the market trends, stock prices going up, the stock market going down, and I used to wonder what it was all about. I could understand everything else on the news except that, and I always wished one day I would be able to,” she reflects.

Life had a course correction in store.

Now fully versed in all things finance, Broughton is the chief representative officer for JN Bank in Canada, dispensing advice on money matters to customers across the country. It is a position the 36-year-old relishes.

“JN is an exceptionally strong brand in the diaspora. As an immigrant in Canada, while you are trying to assimilate, there’s something powerful about having an affinity to home, and JN provides that,” she explains.

“People here say that when they walk into JN, they feel as if they’ve walked into Half-Way Tree. I take that as a compliment. You are at home. You don’t have to put on a different voice or break down what you’re trying to say. You can be your true, authentic self.”

Her Toronto-based office has oversight of more than 20,000 member accounts. Day-to-day, she courts new business and engages wherever Jamaican immigrants and their descendants are present.

Savings and mortgage accounts are the two flagship services on offer. “I ensure our operations are aligned with the regulations governing our Canadian licences, and I represent the products and services of JN Bank and the JN Group across Canada.”

For this Ardenne High alumna, who read sociology with a minor in human resource development at The University of the West Indies, Mona campus, human connectivity is the engine that powers everything.

Broughton and Team JN are out and about almost everywhere. Jamaica-connected alumni fundraising galas, check. Jerk festivals, check. Community expos, check. Jamaica Days, double-check.

“We try to be at every diaspora-related event. We attend about 80 per cent of them in person to connect, network and represent the brand,” she explains.

Broughton migrated to Canada in 2014 to pursue a postgraduate certificate in finance at Humber College, interning with JN’s Toronto branch upon completing her studies.

She rose to project co-ordinator, then assistant manager for operations and promotions, before departing in 2021 to serve as branch compliance manager at Alterna Savings Credit Union. She returned to JN in 2024.

“I perform this role with pride. It feels almost like a civic duty. Being able to support people in achieving the dream of returning home to retire, purchasing a property, taking a holiday, or ensuring our children maintain that connection to Jamaica. I play a pivotal part in that from here in Canada,” says the financial emissary whose weekends are routinely booked solid.

Summer is the busiest stretch.

“Our whole marketing season is compressed into three or four months, because the rest of the year is winter,” she observes.

“On any given weekend I could be at a community expo, a diaspora gala, or a fundraising brunch.”

She pauses.

“Every weekend I am out of the office. That is how we engage the community.”

Broughton traces the moment that set her firmly on this path to a summer job during her UWI years. After dispatching applications across the corporate sector, she was called to interview at a local bank, recruited for a campaign to launch their online banking platform.

“I got exposed to overall banking operations: teller functions, customer service, opening accounts, the due diligence required. For the first time I was connecting the dots and fully understanding: ‘Oh, this is what I used to see on the news’.”

After graduating, she secured a role in the bank’s financial services division as a settlements officer, executing treasury instructions across stocks, bonds, repos and treasury bills, and obtaining a securities licence in the process. The division was sold in 2014, just as her Canadian student visa came through.

She had already set her course.

“I was ready to do more, learn more, and by then I was absolutely certain I wanted to do it in finance.”

Off she went to Canada.

Assimilation was far from straightforward for the then-23-year-old.

“It was very hard to transition from Jamaica to Canada. I had been living at home with my parents, with a village around me, immediate family, my church community. Moving here meant navigating a new country and, for the first time, being fully independent.”

There was the five-hour daily bus commute from Brampton to Toronto, with multiple connections. Freezing temperatures. An entirely new vocabulary of winter clothing. And a markedly different teaching style from her Canadian lecturers.

“At UWI, you moved at your own pace. At Humber, there were pop quizzes constantly, multiple assignments due at once, you always had to be on your toes. Before, I would absorb the material then go home and digest it. I was a self-taught learner. In Canada, that didn’t work. You had to be constantly engaged, critically thinking, applying what you’d learnt to real scenarios.”

Now 12 years resident and working in Canada, Broughton holds a broad vision for what her work demands and what it could ultimately achieve.

“The diaspora is growing and strong beyond Toronto. I believe the diaspora should have a say in how things are done in Jamaica. We are here, exposed to another way of doing things, and we are seeing what works.”

She proposes that professionals in finance, healthcare and the public sector return to the island on three-to-six-month sabbaticals, contributing expertise and building technical capacity where it is most needed.

When not in the office, the boundary between personal and professional is naturally porous.

“Being at JN, your personal life rolls into your work life because you are always the face of the brand. You get invited to serve on boards, to participate in forums.”

She currently chairs the Metropolitan Action Committee on Violence Against Women, sits on the Jamaica Independence Church Service Committee, and volunteers at the First Mennonite Church in Kitchener, Ontario, where she worships.

Then there is her newly discovered passion: mentoring through the Diaspora Mentorship Academy of the Global Diaspora Council.

“I was assigned a lovely young lady in sixth form at St Elizabeth Technical High School. She keeps me on my toes,” she says with a smile.

The deeper significance is not lost on her.

“I was once in sixth form myself, really wanting to hear from someone who had gone through the same experiences. When this opportunity came, I jumped at it, because it was exactly what I had wished for at her age. The conversations, the identification with what she is going through, I’m grateful for every one of them.”