Country Perspectives

These insights are derived from in-depth country-level diagnostics combining regulatory analysis, stakeholder consultations, and international benchmarking. They highlight how regulatory frameworks are evolving in response to changing service models, digitalisation, and cross-border integration.

Completed Projects

Financial services



Strengthening regulatory frameworks to support financial innovation and improve capital allocation, including reforms to prudential requirements, regulatory sandboxes, and cross-border financial services.

ICT and telecommunications services

Improving regulatory fee structures and enabling more efficient infrastructure deployment, while supporting digital services and innovation through enhanced regulatory clarity. 

Transport and logistics services


Enhancing efficiency and transparency in logistics systems, including reforms to enable digital trade instruments such as electronic bills of lading and improve port and logistics services. 

Travel and tourism services


Strengthening regulatory frameworks to support sustainable tourism growth, including improvements in labour standards, environmental frameworks, and service quality. 

Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia has implemented a comprehensive programme of services regulatory reforms across key sectors, aimed at enhancing competitiveness, improving regulatory efficiency, and supporting services trade. Aligned with the Kingdom’s Vision 2030 agenda, the initiative has identified over 120 regulatory and procedural barriers and developed actionable reform options through targeted sectoral assessments and stakeholder engagement.

These reforms span financial services, ICT and telecommunications, transport and logistics, and tourism, supporting Saudi Arabia’s broader economic transformation and strengthening its position as a regional services hub.

Key outcomes

  • Over 120 targeted regulatory reform options developed across five priority services sectors, supported by international benchmarking and stakeholder input
  • Extensive engagement with more than 80 private sector stakeholders and over 12 regulatory authorities, ensuring reforms are grounded in practical implementation challenges
  • Reform recommendations actively progressing into regulatory pipelines, with selected measures under review and early implementation across multiple sectors

South Africa – Climate Finance Services

South Africa’s advanced financial sector and strong policy momentum create significant opportunities for climate finance, but firms face both traditional regulatory frictions and emerging barriers linked to digital and sustainability frameworks.

Key Takeaways

Complex regulatory pathways for integrated services

Climate-finance activities span multiple regulatory domains, which can make market entry and expansion less straightforward for integrated service models.

Limited reliance on cross-border regulatory recognition

Differences in recognition and accreditation processes can increase administrative requirements for foreign and regional service providers.

Data governance considerations for digital services

Requirements related to data use, cloud infrastructure, and cross-border processing shape how digital climate-finance services are structured and delivered.

Fragmentation in sustainability frameworks


Diverging ESG reporting requirements and sustainability standards can increase complexity for climate-finance services operating across jurisdictions.

Nigeria - Express Delivery Services

Nigeria’s rapidly growing courier delivery and e-commerce ecosystem is constrained by a mix of structural bottlenecks and emerging regulatory challenges affecting efficiency, cost, and scalability.

Key Takeaways

Fragmented and cumulative market-entry processes

Market entry and expansion involve multiple approvals across different authorities, which can create complexity and longer timelines for operators.

Structured licensing frameworks affecting scaling

Licensing categories linked to geographic scope can make incremental expansion more administratively demanding for growing operators.

Evolving regulatory treatment of digital logistics models

Platform-based and data-driven logistics services are not yet fully reflected in existing regulatory frameworks, creating uncertainty around classification, licensing, and operational models.


Limited interoperability in digital trade and logistics systems

The coexistence of multiple digital and manual systems, with limited data-sharing across agencies, constrains seamless logistics operations and increases compliance complexity.

Cross-cutting Insights

Across country engagements, findings point to a shift in the nature of regulatory constraints. In addition to traditional market-access and competition barriers, new-generation barriers are becoming more prominent, particularly those linked to data governance, cross-border data flows, cloud infrastructure, and evolving sustainability and ESG frameworks. These factors increasingly shape how services are delivered, scaled, and integrated across borders, and will be central to enabling more efficient and future-ready services sectors.

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