Palau's Linked Online Corporate and Secured Transactions Registry

Palau passed a Secured Transactions Act in 2010 with ADB/PSDI support and launched an online Personal Property Securities Registry in 2011, letting businesses pledge movable assets — vehicles, equipment, inventory — as loan collateral instead of relying solely on land, which in Palau is often communally held and hard to mortgage.
In 2025, corporate-registration responsibility moved from the Office of the Attorney General to the Financial Institutions Commission (FIC), which launched a new Online Corporate Registry on 20 January 2025 built on a shared regional software platform PSDI also deployed in the Cook Islands and Tonga. The new system links corporate and secured-transactions records, so a company's incorporation number auto-populates its details in the collateral registry.
The reform is financed and technically supported by the Asian Development Bank together with the Governments of Australia and New Zealand through PSDI, working with Palau's government — the kind of concessional technical partnership several Pacific microstates rely on given limited domestic administrative capacity.
As a January 2025 launch with public rollout continuing into FY2026, no independent post-implementation usage or economic-impact data specific to Palau was found yet; existing businesses have one year to re-register with the FIC, a transition worth monitoring.

Read the full analysis: https://islandtimes.org/fic-designated-as-registrar-of-corporations/