ONE STOP SHOP TO IMPROVE INVESTOR SERVICES IN BANGLADESH

Bangladesh aspires to be a middle-income country by 2021. To get there, the country is strengthening its investment competitiveness, overall business climate, and prioritizing investment critical indicators to enhance growth. Improvement of the business environment and investment competitiveness depends on simplified and streamlined cross-government functions. Currently, the country is experiencing inadequate information transparency, limited access to information, lack of enforcement of regulations and cumbersome Government to Business (G2B) service delivery. As a solution, Bangladesh will implement an online facilitation mechanism called One Stop Shop (OSS), which aims to bring relevant government agencies together, coordinated and streamlined, to provide efficient and transparent services to investors. With Bangladesh Investment Development Authority (BIDA) as the lead agency, the OSS will integrate 118 workflow processes from 35 agencies. BIDA needed contractor support to update and develop the functional, technical, and operational requirements for the OSS, reengineer business processes across stakeholder agencies, and implement the online OSS system.

Apex Consulting was selected for the project due to our consultants’ experience in the governance, systems, and technologies related to Foreign Direct Investment and knowledge of the Bangladesh investment-related legal and regulatory framework.

Our team started the project by developing a national roadmap for the establishment and implementation of the OSS. We reviewed the legal and regulatory framework and developed models for governance, operations, revenues, and fees. To re-engineer the business process, we develop as-is and to-be frameworks, Standard Operating Procedures, Communications Strategy, and Risk Management Strategy.

Our consultants developed the technical and functional requirements and specifications for the new electronic online one stop shop system.

What were the results of this project?

The new OSS system was launched in January 2019 in Bangladesh Investment Development Board (BIDA) which introduced a new level of IT modernization in the core participating Agencies for the issuance of permits, licenses and permissions necessary for investments in various economic sectors.  Many of these Agencies were paper based with little to no automation or computerization to support the functioning of the Agency. Apex optimized business processes related to the issuances of permits, licenses and permissions to fully leverage the possibilities and potential for the OSS system.