Shipping one product across CARICOM’s currencies

Currency is the first architectural decision, not the last

Across the basin you will meet a hard peg (the EC dollar at 2.70, the Barbados dollar at 2.00, the Bahamian dollar at par), a floating rate (the Trinidad and Tobago dollar, the Jamaican dollar, the Dominican peso, the Haitian gourde), the euro in the French territories, and the US dollar used outright in several others. Our ecosystem directory lists which is which, territory by territory.

A product that stores money as a float, or as a number without a currency, will be wrong in the region. Integer minor units with an explicit currency, conversion only at an explicit boundary, and never a cross-currency comparison without converting first — this is the whole rule and it is not optional here.

There is no regional licence and there is no regional rail

Our licensing research found no passporting in CARICOM and none in the ECCU either. There is likewise no single payments rail that reaches the whole membership: what clears in Port of Spain is not what clears in Castries.

The consequence for architecture is the same as the consequence for the ECCU: make the rail a row. A territory should be able to gain or lose a payment method through configuration and a migration, without a release that touches checkout logic.

One clock is a bug

The region is mostly UTC−4 with no daylight saving, which lures teams into hardcoding the offset. It is wrong: Turks and Caicos observes daylight saving, so a fixed −4 is wrong there for half the year, silently, and in the direction that makes "open now" and cut-off times lie.

We store an IANA timezone per territory and ask the database, never an offset. The test that matters pins an instant where the Caribbean and UTC disagree about the weekday, not the hour.

Language, and the territories people forget

Spanish in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico; French in Guadeloupe, Martinique, St. Barthélemy and St. Martin; Haitian Creole and French in Haiti; Dutch and Papiamentu in Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire. A "Caribbean" product that ships only in English has excluded a large share of the basin before it launched.

Build the copy layer as data from the start. Retrofitting internationalisation after the screens exist costs several times what including it does.

Common questions

How many currencies does a regional product need to handle?

Plan for at least a dozen across the basin, in three behaviours: hard-pegged, floating, and borrowed outright. Our per-territory pages list the currency and, where the peg is statutory, the rate.

Can I launch in one territory and expand later?

Yes, and you should. What must be in from day one is the shape: money with a currency, a rail as a row, a timezone per territory. Those are cheap at the start and expensive to add afterwards.

Which territories does Fete Labs cover?

Twenty-nine, across the basin, listed in the ecosystem directory with currency, timezone, dialling code and bloc for each.