➣ FinTech Founders Bootcamp is a practical training program built to bring founders, bankers, and finance professionals up to speed on the trends, tools, and regulatory questions shaping financial technology. The program was organized by PASHA Bank with SUP.VC as the delivery partner, and ran over two days, 19–20 July 2022, in Baku. The agenda combined international and local expertise, with sessions on NFTs and their commercial applications, the open banking model and its development, the rise of neobanks, and the regulatory challenges around cryptocurrency-driven financial inclusion — alongside a dedicated look at the legal and regulatory framework governing Azerbaijan's fintech sector.

The brief

➣ By the early 2020s, fintech had moved from a niche corner of banking into one of the fastest-moving fields in finance globally — open banking, neobanks, digital assets, and new payment rails were reshaping how financial institutions and founders thought about the market, often faster than local regulation and local talent could track. For PASHA Bank, a leading corporate financial institution with 15 years of activity in the market, the challenge was to give the country's fintech-facing professionals — bank teams, founders building in the space, and the next generation of IT specialists — direct access to that fast-moving global conversation, rather than leaving them to follow it secondhand. A single conference would not do this; the format needed to be practical and dense enough to leave participants with usable knowledge, not just talking points.

Why PASHA Bank partnered with SUP.VC

➣ PASHA Bank brought the institutional credibility, the regulatory relationships, and the brand to convene this conversation at a national level. What running a multi-speaker, two-day practical bootcamp requires beyond that — sourcing and coordinating an international speaker lineup, structuring the agenda around practical takeaways rather than panel talk, and operating registration and delivery logistics — is the kind of execution capacity an acceleration-program operator is built around. SUP.VC acted as the organizing partner alongside PASHA Bank, handling program design and delivery so the bank's team could focus on content and relationships rather than logistics.

The Agenda

➣ The bootcamp's speaker lineup brought together three distinct vantage points on the sector. Simon Hardy, founder and director of Findexable, a UK-based fintech data and ranking company, spoke to global fintech trends and benchmarks. Ramil Maharramov, senior finance and private sector advisor at the World Bank, brought the development-finance perspective on financial inclusion and digital assets. Khayaladdin Tagiyev, chief specialist at Azerbaijan's National Payment Systems Development and Oversight Department, covered the regulatory and legislative side — the rules any fintech operating in or entering the Azerbaijani market needs to work within. Across the two days, the program moved from global trends (NFTs and their use cases, the open banking model) to forward-looking themes (neobanks, the next wave of fintech technology) to the question every founder and bank team in the room needed answered: how cryptocurrency-driven financial inclusion is being regulated, and where the open questions remain.

What PASHA Bank gained

➣ The bootcamp let PASHA Bank extend its long-running role in Azerbaijan's IT and fintech ecosystem — already built over 15 years of activity and a track record of convening tech-focused events — into a focused, practical format aimed squarely at the fintech community. By pairing its own platform with an international fintech-benchmarking expert, a World Bank advisor, and a regulator from the national payment systems authority, the bank positioned itself at the center of the conversation between global fintech trends and Azerbaijan's specific regulatory environment — reinforcing its standing with both the fintech founders it may eventually bank or partner with, and the regulators shaping the rules they will operate under.