1) The Bahamas Financial Services Board has failed in leadership. Each chair, including present one, are caretakers only, collecting a fat salary while doing essentially nothing, not even strategic thinking.

2) Ex-Central Bank Governor Julian Francis once said that the Bahamas would be a very different place if we had enacted reforms early and become blue-ribbon commercial banks. We would have thrived simply because we are not American banks, we are in a reasonable jurisdiction and our banks had minimal exposure to the toxic assets which brought down banks in 2007-2008. We could have been doing very well if we had given up our own version of toxic assets -- tax avoidance and evasion.

3) The direction of our own financial services industry is not guided by the big players, but by the numerous small players who have tenaciously clung to wealth management for sketchy clients. Players like Julian Brown, Owen Bethel, Montaque, Benchmark, Calendonia, Gentles et al have blackened the eye of the Bahamas while the regulators and BFSB board failed in leadership to squelch shady operators.

Right now, we are a dollar short and a day late. The only possible saving grace is to adopt a fintech model, but the bozos and donkey's asses collecting sinecures to "guide" our financial services, are incompetent morons without a strategic thought in their heads, intent on being gravy-sucking pigs, without doing any work to remediate our second pillar.

Gucci bags make a fine tasting souse if you boil it long enough.

Good points. My guess is that bookings are non-existent or too low to warrant opening.

Frigging idiots. The government needs a Chief Information Officer to make sure that each IT platform talks to other IT platforms in the government. Otherwise it is just a massive waste of money on IT systems that do not work. These IT companies see the jokers from the government coming, rob them blind and gives them stuff that doesn't work.

Glory Hallelujah, I agree with Birdie for the first time. Here's the real picture -- Kwasi is in over his head. He assembled a team led by no other than Donovan Moxey, who has a PhD in Engineering, but was running an app company. Moxey was the brains of the outfit, but he knows nothing about establishing a tech hub. In the meantime, he was appointed to BPL and we all know how that turned out. There was another marquee Bahamian woman who worked at one of the biggest tech companies in the world. She was on the advisory committee. She started an app company, and I think that didn't go off well, and she may be back in the USA. So Kwasi's blue ribbon board was a bust. Their big idea was to grant tech visas to qualified individuals who can't get into the US. The hare-brained idea was that they would work for the US companies in Freeport. They didn't have a clue as to how stupid that idea was, yet we have a law on the books for that.

Kwasi tried to do it all with mainly local talent that turned out not to have Tech Hub talent. So Kwasi gloms onto this app idea because no tech company in their right mind would want to move to Grand Bahama, or even Nassau because of the lack of infrastructure, the inconsistent and expensive power (servers need to be on all of the time) and poor ease of doing business. There is a way to do it, but there is no budget. And they need to get foreign help.

What a stupid frigging idea -- app development training. According to the Gartner Group which is the industry IT think tank, 9999 out of every 10,000 apps do not make money. 30% of users drop apps after a single use. The most commonly used apps are designed by Fortune 500 companies to enhance and extend their product offerings. These apps are designed and programmed by teams of professional software engineers.

A software engineering program with all of the maths, sciences and advanced studies at University of Bahamas would be more helpful, rather than an assembly line of poorly trained coders who will have their dreams smashed. The biggest issue, outside of selling a pipe dream to young Bahamians, is that it is wasting time to get a Tech Hub off the ground.

It looks like Senator Thompson is lost, doesn't know what to do, and is taking a Hail Mary stab at an idea that he doesn't think is stupid, but will be in the long run.

This Tech Hub idea has been stuck in the mud for over 3 years while other jurisdictions are thriving. (Cayman has attracted over 200 companies and startups in the interval contributing to a GDP per capita of over $82,000. Ours is $23,000).

The other aspect is that they aren't serious about it. They don't want to spend money, or hire the professionals that can advise them to get instant results. Instead they are looking for the cheap way out, or just talking about it with countless meetings and no actions.

This is another failed idea that could have saved us, but there is incompetence at the top.

The penny stock play has run its course in the Bahamas. They milked it for all its worth. Time to find fresh pockets who are not onto the game.

Many of the commentators here have it right. Rodgers assumes that all one has to do it, is "open it up" and dollars will flow in. Not true. Before I left the Nassau banking scene, my job in wealth management was to assist high net worth individuals move their money out of Nassau -- largely because of their business interests. That's when I saw the writing on the wall, after a second billionaire client of the bank repatriated his wealth.
The Bahamas has a black eye in the wealth management field for many reasons, including anonymous IBCs, a totally incompetent regulator who let the likes of Benchmark, Montaque etc use client money without any punitive damages to the principals who did it, a useless, moribund, non-liquid stock exchange, KYC rules that punish Bahamians but give a pass to High Net Worth Individuals, lawyers who tout a system of fair laws, yet there is zero degrees of separation between judges, state, business and lawyers. It was the US who brought Nygard down, Perry and the PLPs welcomed him. ... I could go on.
You have to have economic activity to induce influx of capital. US Dollars/capital is the fuel of economic activity. What's the point of having fuel without an engine.
So the quick answer is to let foreigners come in to do business. The quick rebuttal to that is that the ease of doing business eats into profits and is unsound. Who wants to wait 3 months for a $15,000 work permit, or 6 months for business approvals, or ... this is the stupid one ... paying your business tax up front based on turnover, when you haven't turned it over yet. We are retards in the entire business field.
Bottom line, we are fooked. We don't have a massive cadre of educated human capital, and that situation is exacerbated by the brain drain. We don't have a friendly business environment. We have onerous hoops to jump through for legislation and permits, and we have a populace that is largely unenlightened and suspicious of technology and globalization.

The big news not covered in this article, is that Ferguson says that we will lose another 5 - 7 banks in the next 24 months, further eroding "financial services". More job losses. The second pillar of the economy is collapsing. Tourism already is in intensive care.

You do know that this is a penny stock play and the company does not have any intention of drilling right? They already have made millions with the stock and could shut down tomorrow. These junior resource penny stock plays have been happening for 70 years in other resource rich companies like Canada, and less than 0.001 percent of them come to fruition, but the organisers of these plays make millions. There is nothing new under the sun, except the duplicity of the promoters and the gullibility o the public.