The best way for investment promotion agencies to reinvent is also the cheapest: place data-driven aftercare at the core of their pitches.
Carolina Arriagada Peters convened the fourth Aftercare Forum in Riga last week, which ran under a banner reading Tech-Powered Aftercare. She has been making the case for years. Her 2022 book, the first to map what happens after a foreign investor signs, argued that retention is the neglected last leg of the journey, and in February she pressed governments again, in a note for Columbia University’s sustainable-investment centre, to take it seriously. The technology on show in Riga was the easy part, and the cheap part. The more useful argument in the hall was that the data behind it is what could let the profession reinvent itself.
Reinvantage has ranked the investment promotion agencies (IPAs) of the Baltics, Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Caucasus, and latterly parts of the Middle East and Central Asia, since 2018, and the ones that score highest share a habit the others lack: they are nosy. The best run an investor relationship like an intelligence operation. They want to know which executive was promoted last month, and which supplier is being paid late. Whose hiring has stopped. What a chief executive said about the country on the last earnings call, and in what tone. They watch the public traces too, matching a thinning job board or a cooler earnings call against what the investor told them across the table. They keep records, monitor data and signals, and broker introductions before a stalled recruitment or a strained supplier turns into a reason to leave. Very little of this (if any) is guesswork.
In October 2024 the European Central Bank reported that special-purpose entities, shells with hardly any staff and no real activity, dominate Cyprus’s external accounts and inflate its recorded foreign direct investment (FDI) well beyond anything happening on the island. Jannick Damgaard and two colleagues had earlier estimated, for the IMF, that close to 40 per cent of the world’s FDI is phantom, money threaded through empty companies to trim a tax bill. The headline inflows agencies tout, in other words, say little about whether anyone is building anything, or staying.
In February 2025 Marianela Urgellés, the managing director of CINDE, Costa Rica’s investment agency, presented its results for the previous year: of 73 projects it had supported, 52 were reinvestments by companies already in the country. CINDE earns that by design, walking investors through permits and connecting them to local suppliers. UNCTAD has long found the same shape in richer economies, where more than half of FDI, and sometimes over two-thirds, comes from firms already present rather than fresh arrivals. That is the prize good aftercare is chasing, and it seldom shows up in the numbers a minister reads aloud.
Alexandre de Crombrugghe, who runs the OECD’s investment-promotion network, has spent years documenting why so few agencies bother. In survey after survey, the function that retains and advises existing investors draws the least money and the fewest staff. The people doing it tend to be the most committed in the building and the worst resourced. A minister will stand beside a new factory for the cameras. The investor who weighed leaving and chose to stay gets no such photograph. So an agency knows what its investors promised on paper, and what they filed eight or nine months ago, and almost nothing about what they are doing now. By the time a departure reaches the press, the decision was usually taken months earlier, when nobody at the agency was watching.
Right hand, left hand
Taavi Ploompuu of Estonia’s Information System Authority oversees X-Road, the exchange layer that has let the country’s tax office, statistics bureau and registries pass data to one another since 2001, and that lets any citizen see who looked at their records, and when. Where data moves like that, an aftercare team can see what is happening to its investors. Where it does not, the agency is reduced to guessing. The tools to act on the data are cheap, an off-the-shelf customer system and some signal-monitoring software, so the binding constraint is rarely money. It is the will to make one arm of the state share what it holds with another.
The Foreign Investors’ Council in Latvia found, in its 2025 sentiment survey, that about half of the investors it polled in Latvia and Estonia meant to commit more capital, the sort of signal an alert agency acts on. Chambers and sector bodies pick up others. A few years ago the region’s technology founders noticed peers reincorporating abroad to escape the way share options were taxed, lobbied their governments, and won new rules in January 2021; Andris Berzins of Change Ventures welcomed them, and Index Ventures rated the result the most generous stock-option regime in Europe.
Data-driven reinvention
This is where reinvention enters, and it is the part that matters most. Almost every investment promotion agency pitch rests on the same three claims: a place in the heart of Europe, a young and multilingual workforce, and competitive incentives. By one rough count, between 14 and 20 European locations describe themselves as the continent’s heart. Most organisms manage one.
The pitches are close to interchangeable. Swap the country name and barely a word would need to change. Location matters less each year in any case, after a brief flurry of nearshoring during the Covid-19 pandemic and again once Russia invaded Ukraine.
What should set an agency apart is the record it can show, the investors retained, the reinvestment won, the regulation it saw coming and helped change before anyone asked. All of this requires data. Data also pays off when an investment unravels, as some do: an agency that loses a firm is asked why, usually by the next one it is courting, and the one that can answer precisely reassures where guesswork does not. Almost nobody leads with any of this in their pitches, for want of the data to prove it.
That is the challenge now facing IPAs: finding out who has the data they need, and then building systems to ensure that data flows to agencies on a regular, routine basis. Then the real work can begin: placing data-driven aftercare at the core of IPA reinvention.
This article is a distilled version of a talk given by Reinvantage’s Craig Turp-Balazs at the Riga Aftercare Forum on June 3. If you are interested in finding out more about how investment promotion is developing, and whether your IPA is aligned, you can take Reinvantage’s short, introductory assessment for IPAs, here.
Photo: Dreamstime.