BUCE’s electronic trading platform www.zakupki.butb.by may be used for E-procurement under World Bank projects. WB experts are currently studying this possibility. Such statement came from Hunt La Cascia, WB Senior Procurement Specialist, during the meeting with Oleg Yakubovich, BUCE Senior Vice-Chairman, at BUCE head office in Minsk on January 28, 2016.

This meeting became a logical continuation of the talks that took place in September 2015. Back then, WB experts got a general idea of the public procurement system in the Republic of Belarus, familiarized themselves with the legal framework and studied the procedure of holding electronic auctions and requests for quotations at BUCE’s electronic trading platform. The prospects of BUCE-WB collaboration were also discussed in the course of the International E-procurement Forum “Using E-Procurement Data to Measure the Transparency and Performance of Public Spending” held in Vienna (Austria) in December 2015.

According to Hunt La Cascia, the decision regarding the use of BUCE’s electronic platform in WB projects depends on the results of the assessment that WB plans to perform in the fall of 2016. This is a standard procedure that all national platforms have to go through. If the assessment is a success, BUCE’s platform will become eligible for use not only within the frames of WB projects but also by other multilateral institutions such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Asian Development Bank, Islamic Development Bank, etc. As a result, the convenience and efficiency of public procurement procedures are bound to increase, whereas the costs will likely go down.

According to Oleg Yakubovich, BUCE Senior Vice-Chairman, BUCE is primarily a commodity exchange with extensive opportunities and ramified infrastructure and not merely an electronic platform operator. Therefore, its cooperation with the World Bank can be much wider.