Phase one of TTBi­zLink, a Web site that al­lows in­di­vid­u­als and com­pa­nies to con­nect with the gov­ern­ment on­line for busi­ness and trade pur­pos­es, is ex­pect­ed to go live in late April. The plat­form was in­au­gu­rat­ed un­der the pre­vi­ous ad­min­is­tra­tion but has been a ma­jor fo­cus of Trade Min­is­ter, Stephen Cadiz. Un­til it goes live, busi­ness­es are asked to reg­is­ter on­line in or­der to be able to ac­cess the por­tal. The site is de­signed to help make busi­ness less ex­pen­sive, speed up the process of con­duct­ing com­merce and make the twin-is­land a more at­trac­tive place for trade and for­eign di­rect in­vest­ment. TTBi­zLink (www.ttbi­zlink.gov.tt) is a world-class mod­el that is de­signed af­ter the on­line trade por­tal in Sin­ga­pore known as TradeNet. World Bank ranks Sin­ga­pore first for hav­ing the most open econ­o­my for in­ter­na­tion­al trade and in­vest­ment and for be­ing the eas­i­est place to do busi­ness.

T&T has made a com­mit­ment to in­crease its rank­ing in the ease of do­ing busi­ness in the next 2-5 years. "We knew as a coun­try we had to come up to speed to in­crease our com­pet­i­tive­ness," says Ran­dall Karim, Di­rec­tor, Pol­i­cy & Strat­e­gy at the Min­istry of Trade & In­dus­try. "TTBi­zLink does just that." In­di­vid­u­als and com­pa­nies who want to im­port and ex­port goods, ap­ply for busi­ness per­mits and li­cens­es, reg­is­ter a busi­ness and con­duct any oth­er trade ac­tiv­i­ty can sub­mit a sin­gle doc­u­ment on­line at the TTBi­zLink web­site. The in­for­ma­tion will then be rout­ed to the rel­e­vant gov­ern­ment agen­cies for their ap­proval. Ac­cord­ing to the Min­istry of Trade and In­dus­try, these busi­ness process­es that once took 1-3 weeks will even­tu­al­ly take 1-3 days. "We want to be­come a glob­al play­er be­yond en­er­gy to at­tract and do busi­ness with the world. TTBi­zLink pro­vides the ef­fi­cien­cy to be one," says Karim.