Agency coordination

Cooperation within a country is essential for the effective regulation of digital financial services (DFS). Several authorities should have a say in this process, including competition regulators, data protection agencies, central banks, financial conduct supervisors, telecom regulators, and legislators. These entities must align their initiatives, coordinate inspections, and collaborate on cases involving the same market players. Such coordination helps close regulatory and supervisory gaps, ensures more efficient use of limited resources, and increases the likelihood of successfully addressing competition issues while maintaining the goal of improved access to DFS.

Beyond national borders, international cooperation among jurisdictions is also key. It helps prevent regulatory arbitrage and enables a unified response to anti-competitive practices by firms with significant market power. The most pressing concerns in this area often involve Big Tech companies—typically global players like Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, Alibaba, and Tencent, but also regional firms such as Mercado Libre in Latin America and Jumia in Africa. When a national authority needs to request data from one of these companies, for example during an investigation, having a cooperative counterpart in the firm's home jurisdiction can be extremely beneficial. Without such cooperation, the process can become slow and bureaucratic, often requiring court proceedings and diplomatic channels.

Competition issues can also be addressed within the framework of intergovernmental blocs. Although regional economic cooperation can be difficult to implement, it offers an effective way to align regulation, supervision, and enforcement across multiple countries. This can be achieved either by assigning competition responsibilities to part of an existing economic bloc’s administrative structure or by creating an independent, specialized entity focused solely on competition matters. While the former may be easier to establish among countries already part of a bloc, the latter can deliver more targeted and effective outcomes.

EXAMPLE/ACF: The African Competition Forum, established in 2011, is a cooperative institution composed of the national competition authorities or governments of 32 African nations. Although the ACF isn’t tasked with regulatory tasks, it undertakes awareness raising and capacity building in competition topics among its members¹.

EXAMPLE/EEC: The Eurasian Economic Union is a single market bloc whose member states are Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia. In the framework of its executive body (the Eurasian Economic Commission), two departments take on work on competition, namely Antitrust Regulation and Competition Policy.