MANILA, Philippines — As the Philippines welcomes the global business and investment leaders this week, the country has an opportunity to show it can compete with its ASEAN neighbors for investment at scale by modernizing its regulatory environment, according to the Management Association of the Philippines (MAP).
“The government has worked hard to put the Philippines in front of investors, and hosting this summit is proof of that. The next step is building a regulatory environment that can stand alongside the best in the region,” MAP president Donald Lim said in a statement.
“Investors looking at Southeast Asia don’t just ask whether they can enter a market. They ask where they can scale. Modern, responsive rules are what turn a promising first investment into a long-term regional commitment,” he added.
Lim noted that ASEAN economies are competing for the same pool of capital in digital platforms, mobility and financial services, and that the markets drawing the largest commitments are those whose rules evolve alongside these industries.
Many of the Philippines’ fastest-growing sectors, he said, are still operating under frameworks designed for an earlier stage of the market.
He cited three recent cases that show how clearer rules and processes would benefit regulators and businesses alike.
These include a multimillion-peso penalty imposed by a transport regulator on a motorcycle-taxi platform, the nationwide block of chat app Discord that followed a 24-hour compliance ultimatum from the Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center and was lifted less than a day later.
He also mentioned the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas push for banks and e-wallets to cut or waive InstaPay and PESONet transfer fees within a matter of weeks, a shift that touched a key revenue stream of the country’s largest homegrown e-wallet as it was weighing a potential public listing.
“In each case, regulators were acting on legitimate goals, and businesses wanted to comply. What was missing was a clear, shared playbook,” Lim said.
“One service has outgrown the limits set during its pilot. Another situation moved from ultimatum to block with no defined steps in between. In the third, lower fees are good for consumers, but a change of that scale would have benefited from a published assessment of its impact on the platforms that carry most of those transfers, including one that investors were watching closely. Regional investors notice these details when they compare markets side by side. These are solvable gaps, and closing them is how we give investors the confidence to choose the Philippines and scale here,” he said.
To build that environment, Lim proposed that government and industry work together to transition fast-growing sectors from pilot regimes to permanent legal frameworks, with rules grounded in actual market data and reviewed on a regular schedule with industry and workers. This will allow regulation to keep pace as markets expand and help the country match the predictability investors find elsewhere in the region.
He also suggested a graduated enforcement approach across agencies, moving from formal notice and a reasonable compliance window to targeted action before any shutdown or suspension, along with impact assessments for major regulatory changes, so that both regulators and businesses know what to expect at every step.