Almost all Colombian state procurement lives in one place: SECOP. It is not a single platform but an ecosystem of three parts. SECOP I, the oldest, works as little more than a noticeboard where entities post documents. SECOP II is the transactional platform where most processes are now structured, evaluated, awarded, signed and performed. And the Colombian State Virtual Store (TVEC) runs the framework price agreements. Concrete legal duties rest on that infrastructure: the publicity required by Law 1150 of 2007 and Law 1712 of 2014, the traceability of the contract cycle regulated by Decree 1082 of 2015 and, in practice, the very possibility that a watchdog, a journalist or a competitor can see how public money is spent.
That ecosystem is going to be replaced. Colombia Compra Eficiente (the National Public Procurement Agency) and the ICT Ministry set up a National Dialogue Roundtable on 7 February 2025 to build a new public procurement system. The official diagnosis is severe: the Agency describes platforms with obsolete architectures, slow procedures and service outages that make it hard to follow contracts. The numbers bear it out. Operating, maintaining and improving SECOP cost more than COP 127,000 million over a decade, of which roughly COP 25,000 million was spent in 2024 alone. And technical incidents soared: from 4,552 in 2022 to 17,787 in 2023, averaging close to 1,020 reports a month through 2024.
The project, still without an official name — the Agency simply calls it the "New SECOP" and is taking suggestions — aims to unify the three platforms into one, with permanent availability, better search filters and capacity to support around a million active users and some 200,000 new contracts a month. To fund it, Colombia Compra Eficiente opened a merit-based competition worth more than COP 23,000 million; the contractor was selected around April 2025 and the design and development contract ran to 31 December 2025.
The announced timetable is phased, and it is no small matter for anyone overseeing or bidding. The first stage, through to the end of 2025, focused on solution design, the cross-cutting modules and direct contracting, which on its own accounts for more than 75% of the system's transactions. The second stage, planned for 2026, brings in open tender, merit-based competition, framework agreements and public-private partnerships. During the transition both systems will coexist: the old ones will remain available for consultation only, with no new transactions. That direct contracting — the least competitive method and the one most exposed to corruption — is the first to migrate, and in an election year at that, is precisely what has fuelled the debate.
Because the modernisation arrives with objections. A Bogotá city councillor warned that a change of this magnitude is starting through the most delicate door and just months before the 2026 elections. Analysts and trade associations have pointed to the thin detail in the cost structure, doubts about a small team for such a large project and, above all, the absence of a complete contingency and transition plan. The most cited blind spot: more than 160 municipalities are still operating on the old SECOP I, and a poorly planned migration could leave parts of the country with no digital trace of their contracts just when they most need watching. On top of that, the current system does not meet international web accessibility standards (W3C), a debt the new design promises to settle.
While the replacement advances, the Agency has tightened the rules of the current system. External Circular 003 of 2024 reiterated that SECOP II is mandatory as the transactional platform, and External Circular 003 of 2025, dated 24 June, insisted on correct use of the platform for publishing procurement processes. These are signals that, until the New SECOP is stable, SECOP II remains the official source and the contract's electronic file: the preliminary studies, the bidding documents, the offers, the evaluation, the signed contract, the amendments and the final settlement all belong there.
What changes in practice? For entities, a migration of data and workflows, more training and the operational risk of living with two platforms at once. For suppliers, a new interface that promises to be more stable and intuitive, but also the fear — voiced by several trade associations — that new barriers or technical requirements will make bidding harder. For watchdogs and the public, the challenge is twofold: learning to use the new platform and, above all, insisting that the transition breaks neither the continuity nor the openness of the historical data. Traceable public procurement does not depend on software alone: it depends on every act being published, complete and on time.
That is where an orderly transition becomes a matter of transparency and not only of technology. Tools like LuxIA are built on SECOP's open data: without consistent publication and a preserved historical record, risk analysis and citizen oversight lose their raw material. The New SECOP can be an opportunity — cleaner data, in real time and with sovereignty over the information — or a step backwards, if the migration happens without a contingency plan or guarantees of interoperability. The recommendation for anyone overseeing is concrete: follow the timetable closely, check that the direct contracting processes migrating first keep all their documents, and do not assume that "new" means "more transparent" until the data prove it.