The World Bank’s Business Ready (B-READY) 2025 survey records Cambodia as the highest-scoring economy in ASEAN in the Financial Services policy area, with a score of 84.45 out of 100 among assessed countries. Within the B-READY framework, financial services also emerge as Cambodia’s strongest-performing sector, placing it ahead of regional peers and among the stronger performers globally in this specific policy area.
Cambodia’s position reflects performance across three core dimensions assessed by B-READY: the regulatory framework, supporting public services, and operational efficiency in practice. The regulatory framework provides a relatively strong foundation, including legal protections for lenders and borrowers, functioning credit registries, and rules governing secured transactions. These rules are supported by public institutions and services that help translate regulations into practice rather than leaving them largely on paper. At the operational level, firms appear able to access financial services with fewer procedural frictions than in many neighbouring economies. Taken together, these factors suggest a degree of institutional reliability and accessibility that is uncommon within the region, particularly for a lower-middle-income economy.
B-READY is the World Bank’s flagship assessment of business environments, looking at how regulations, public services, and institutional effectiveness shape firms’ ability to operate, grow, and create jobs. Financial services are therefore only one part of a broader system. The same survey shows that Cambodia’s performance across policy areas remains uneven, with weaker results in dispute resolution, market competition, and business insolvency. In simple terms, Cambodia has built a relatively strong financial backbone, while parts of the legal and competitive framework have yet to catch up.
This imbalance matters for how financial strength translates into real economic outcomes. Even when firms can access credit, they may still face difficulties resolving disputes, competing on fair terms, or exiting the market when business models fail. These challenges reflect a gap between the advancement of financial institutions and the development of legal and market institutions.
From a policy perspective, the value of B-READY lies less in international comparison and more in what it reveals about reform priorities. Cambodia’s results suggest that finance is no longer the main constraint on business activity. The more binding constraints now lie in competition policy, dispute resolution, and insolvency systems. Cambodia’s strong financial performance should therefore be seen not as an end point, but as a foundation that raises the urgency of strengthening the institutions around it, so that existing financial capacity can translate more effectively into investment, productivity, and sustainable private-sector growth.