It is one of the world’s largest centres for offshore banking and insurance business. Its development is facilitated by a preferential tax regime (including the abolition of many taxes).
A total of 430 offshore commercial banks from 36 countries are registered (mainly subsidiaries of leading global banks, 200 of which have representative offices in Nassau and Freeport), as well as offshore trust, investment, insurance, shipping companies and companies providing email domains.
The islands are registered with 1,063 foreign sea vessels (2010), most of them belonging to shipowners from Norway, Greece, the USA and Great Britain. The main operators of the capital market are the Central Bank (1974) and the Bahamas International Stock Exchange (1999; both have head offices in Nassau). Among the largest commercial banks are the British American Bank, Bank of The Bahamas (both headquartered in Nassau), Barbados’s First Caribbean Bank, the American Citibank, Canada’s Royal Bank of Canada, Bank of Nova Scotia and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, and Australia’s Commonwealth Bank.
In the free trade zone near Freeport there is a storage and handling base for petroleum products (capacity 20 million tons), servicing mainly the areas of the Atlantic coast of the United States; under the control of the company “Bahamas Oil Refining Company International”, since 2011 part of the American “Buckeye Partners”.