Transparency is essential for nearly half of infrastructure procurement teams. Proving it is the harder part

Ask a procurement team whether its process is transparent and most will say yes. Ask it to show, months after financial close, who saw a bidder's submission, when, and what happened next, and the answer gets less certain.

That gap between claiming transparency and evidencing it sits underneath one of the clearest shifts in our 2027 Transport Infrastructure Outlook Report , which includes a survey of 150 senior executives across Asia-Pacific, EMEA and the Americas. Close to half of respondents (48%) now consider transparency and auditability essential to their procurement process, up from 37% a year ago.

Policy is pulling in the same direction. The European Parliament's September 2025 resolution on public procurement identified transparency as a priority for overhauling EU procurement rules. In Australia, updated Commonwealth Procurement Rules took effect in November 2025, and the Australian National Audit Office's recent audit work has been explicit that weaknesses in governance and documentation can limit transparency over how key procurement decisions are made.

The direction is clear. But 48% is still short of a majority, and the detail shows where the work remains.

Inside the organisation, visibility is widening

The strongest progress is internal. 29% of respondents now describe their process as 'entirely transparent' to internal stakeholders, up from just 17% a year ago. A further 48% call it 'very transparent', for a combined 77%. Transaction advisories lead every organisation type, with 89% rating their internal process as 'very' or 'entirely transparent'.

The tools have changed underneath this. Purpose-built procurement software was used on 68% of respondents' most recent major projects, up from 39% a year earlier, while email has fallen from the most commonly used channel to one used by 62%, down from 83%.

The effect is a wider circle of people who can see the whole process, not just their slice of it. Craig McMahon, Business Development Director at Ansarada Procure, describes the old pattern: "It used to be that your key internal stakeholders might be your transaction managers and project directors, with others standing off in the background and only really getting involved when their role came up. What we're doing is giving everyone more visibility, because they're becoming more aware of the broader transaction and the broader process, not just their own piece of it."

A caveat worth holding onto: these are self-assessments. The report warns that confidence may be running ahead of evidence, and that infrastructure procurement is prone to optimism bias. 'Very transparent' is a perception. Whether that transparency holds up under scrutiny is a separate test.

Outside the organisation, the picture is thinner

Transparency to external stakeholders, including the market, bidders and the wider public, is considerably lower. Just over half of respondents (55%) describe their process as 'very' or 'entirely transparent' externally, against 77% internally.

The most telling number belongs to the organisations with the heaviest public accountability. Only 53% of government agencies rate their procurement process as either entirely or very transparent to the outside world. As the report states, the accountability that drives stronger internal transparency among government respondents has not translated into meaningfully greater openness externally.

Some of that is structural rather than a failure of will. "Internal transparency is easier to control because it sits within a single organisation, whereas external transparency requires balancing openness with commercial confidentiality and competitive fairness – a challenge that remains significant despite progress," says Audrey Bailly, Business Development Director at Ansarada Procure.

But the external audience is paying closer attention. Luke Whistler, Executive Director of Delta Infrastructure Advisory and Deputy Chair of the Infrastructure Association of Queensland, points to public scrutiny as the driver in Australia: "there have been high-profile instances in professional services where governance failures have attracted significant scrutiny, raising the question of what should be expected of any firm handling millions of dollars of public spending. The short answer is: it must be transparent and it must be secure. That isn't a new standard, it's just more visible."

The confidentiality constraint is real. It doesn't remove the expectation; it raises the bar for showing that commercially sensitive information was handled fairly, even when it can't be published.

Auditability means reconstruction, not storage

Transparency is a claim. Auditability is the evidence behind it, and it's tested when something goes wrong. Luke again: "when things go wrong in project delivery, everything traces back to procurement. During an audit, if you can't reconstruct who said what, who saw what, when decisions were made and on what basis, you may find a troublesome scenario unfolding."

Government agencies feel this most. A third (33%) cite advanced risk analysis tools as their single most important risk allocation lever, which the report links to the governance pressures of public procurement: where decisions may face audit, parliamentary scrutiny or a Freedom of Information request, a documented, quantified basis for each call is essential.

Amanda Branley, CEO and Founder of The Procurement Coach and Former Chief Procurement Officer of the Public Transport Authority of Western Australia, puts conflicts of interest first: "That's the area I'd focus on first and it's consistently underestimated." Defending a procurement, she says, "means being able to show exactly who had access to what information, at what stage, and what influence they had over the specification or the selection process." Her conclusion: "The organisations that defend their procurements well are the ones that have done that groundwork before the auditors arrive, not after."

This is where the record often breaks. Documentation is cited by 47% of respondents as an area most in need of improvement, and the average organisation now runs 3.2 separate platforms across its procurement process. When a file sharing system, a project management tool and email each hold part of the job, no single controlled environment holds a complete, auditable picture, which is the fragmentation purpose-built platforms such as Ansarada Procure are built to remove.

"It's not just about storing documents securely. Sensitive information is constantly being shared between internal teams, suppliers, advisors and external stakeholders," says Audrey. "When that communication happens across email, shared drives or disconnected systems, it becomes very difficult to know who has access to what."

Build the record before anyone asks for it

The shift from 37% to 48% shows the sector knows transparency matters. The internal and external figures show how much of it still rests on confidence rather than evidence. For the full findings, including regional and organisation-type breakdowns, download the 2027 Transport Infrastructure Outlook Report .

Ansarada Procure gives procurement teams one controlled environment to run bidder communications, Q&A and documents, with permissions managed at every stage, activity monitored and a complete audit trail maintained throughout. When the auditors, the market or the minister ask who saw what and when, the answer is already there. Book a demo of Ansarada Procure .