The government is pledged to make doing business in Barbados faster and more predictable, with major reforms due to take effect in the coming months as part of efforts to modernise the island’s investment climate, the minister for business development, Senator Lisa Cummins, said on Monday.
These improvements will also be driven by new digital tools, Senator Cummins told industry figures, as the administration moves to build systems that support business growth and strengthen confidence.
Acknowledging that current bureaucratic processes are “ridiculously long now,” she vowed that “within the coming months, it will get easier, largely because we are transitioning to new platforms that we’re expecting to have completed and put in place by March of 2026,” as she addressed a Jamaica Money Market Brokers (JMMB) thought leadership forum at O2 Beach Club.
“As a government, we’re committed to ensuring that the environment is fit for investment,” she declared. “We’re implementing modernised approvals, reducing the red tape, clearing the regulatory hurdles that are there, introducing stronger institutional governance, transparent monitoring and evaluation frameworks, and making sure that, through the enterprise exchange, that is one element of it.”
The business minister also revealed a whole-of-government approach to making policies for the benefit of micro, small and medium-sized enterprise (MSME), a “roadmap that speaks about the creation of an intersectoral working group across all ministries, so that there is policy alignment across all government agencies, and you’re not going from one place to the next and hearing different things, and each point sending you back to the other.”
Senator Cummins said these institutional changes must be supported by strong business organisations. She told the audience that Barbados has to “embed financial reporting standards, strengthen governance and transparency, support training and development, support export readiness, drive digital and innovation adoption, and create sector-based communities of practice.”
The reforms were being driven by the need to give small businesses and investors greater stability and certainty in how the system operates, she said. “These reforms are necessary to give MSMEs and investors alike what they value most — continuity, predictability, and ultimately confidence, because investment does not follow speeches like these, it follows systems. And so we are building the systems.”
During a question-and-answer segment, concerns were raised by the audience about the weight of regulatory compliance. One industry figure pointed out that requirements had become too difficult even for larger companies.
Acknowledging the burden on firms, Senator Cummins said: “When I think about the regulatory compliance requirements, it’s a challenge, and it’s one of the reasons why we created Business Barbados. We wanted to be able to create a structure that allowed us to get into the weeds of deconstructing and reconstructing how business was transacted in the country.”
She stressed that an outdated legislative framework was partly to blame. The Companies Act, she said, was almost 30 years old and no longer suited to present realities. She cautioned that interpreting an old law in a modern business environment “is something that sometimes gets us into difficulty,” making legislative reform unavoidable. The minister acknowledged that the regulatory process itself remained too slow.
“Sometimes the number of steps that you have to go through, it’s painful,” she admitted. “What is the biggest bugbear for small businesses navigating regulatory compliance? Turnaround time. How long does it take for Barbados to register a business for crying out loud, to change directors for crying out loud?”
She also reminded the audience that Barbados does not control all compliance demands, since many are imposed by international bodies such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the Financial Action Task Force. (SZB)
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