About Us

FIAS assists governments of developing countries and transition economies in reforming their business environments, with emphasis on regulatory simplification and investment generation. FIAS relies on close collaboration with its donors and World Bank Group partners to leverage value and deliver tangible results.

Six strategic themes guide FIAS' delivery model for assisting clients to design and implement significant reforms and investment generation initiatives:

Delivery of measureable business environment reforms

FIAS measures its performance by the volume and quality of business environment reforms and investments facilitated. FIAS has a standardized methodology for classifying reforms and formulated a common set of monitoring and evaluation indicators for activities that affect the business environment.

Emphasis on core areas of expertise

FIAS offers advisory services through products such as Business Entry, Regulatory Governance and Licensing, Trade Logistics, Tax Simplification, and Secured Lending under the Regulatory Simplification practice area; and Investment Policy and Promotion, Industry Competitiveness, and Access to Land products under the Investment Generation practice. The Doing Business Reform unit, with services such as the Doing Business Reform Advisory and Subnational Doing Business provides targeted interventions on designing and implementing reform agendas to improve clients' business environments as measured by the Doing Business indicators.

Decentralized service-delivery model

Headquartered in Washington, DC, FIAS operates on a decentralized model to better serve its clients. FIAS has operational hubs in Belgrade, Dakar, Johannesburg, Nairobi, Sydney, and Vienna, as well as staff located in other World Bank Group field offices.

Focus on IDA countries and frontier regions of non-IDA countries

FIAS' main service priority is IDA countries—recognizing that they have the greatest need for reform and the lowest domestic capacity to create it. This is reflected in FIAS' resource allocation and program expenditures in Sub-Saharan Africa, IDA countries and frontier regions of non-IDA countries. Conflict-affected countries also continue to be a priority, with special programs that validate service-delivery approaches tailored to the unique challenges for investment climate reform and investment generation within these economies.

Alignment with partners

FIAS works in close collaboration with donors and World Bank Group partners to support the reform agendas of its clients. FIAS partners with several bilateral donors to develop service-delivery capabilities in key areas and more effectively serve specific client groups. FIAS has also established joint ventures with World Bank Group units in the Middle East and North Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean, to add to existing partnerships in Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia and the Pacific, South East Europe and South Asia. Finally, FIAS product teams have advisory committees, consisting of representatives from internal and external partners, that collaborate on product development efforts and provide input to program evaluation.

Internal and external client satisfaction

FIAS' success as a product innovator and integrator of World Bank Group investment climate reform capabilities largely depends on meeting the evolving demands of its internal and external clients. Tracking client satisfaction is an important metric through which FIAS measures the success of its programs.



FIAS is managed by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and supported by the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) and the World Bank (IBRD).

Interested in working with FIAS? See our listing of Job Opportunities.

For more information on our Operational Strategy and Annual Reports, please click here.