Dear reader,
The heroic "young founder in a garage" narrative shadows the other side of the spectrum: tech companies launched by massive conglomerates.
An uneducated opinion would be that "conglomerates are slow and not tech-savvy". Refined students of history have a more nuanced view. Some conglomerates are slow, certainly, but others aren't.
And when a conglomerate decides to pour their brand credibility, capital, human resources, and user base into a new digital endeavor, the founder in the garage ought to be worried.
Today's RO article is about Bir, an ecosystem of digital services launched by Kapital Bank, one of Azerbaijan's largest retail banks. Bir's leadership claim they serve 5 million customers, about half of the country's population.
Let's dive in.
Biography
Ruslan Mammadov is the Chief Strategy Officer of Bir ecosystem, an Azerbaijani company that operates in banking and fintech (Birbank), e-commerce (Birmarket), and payments (Birbank, Milliön, m10).
The Bir ecosystem was launched in 2025 around the banking core of Kapital Bank, one of Azerbaijan’s largest retail banks.
Bir is owned by PASHA Holding, a Baku-headquartered investment group with approximately $13.7B in total assets and operations across Azerbaijan, Türkiye, Georgia, Montenegro, Uzbekistan, and the United States.
Throughout its various products, Bir serves more than 5 million customers, about half of Azerbaijan’s population*.
What was Bir’s genesis?
There’s a strong thematic connection to Kaspi, the Kazakh superapp that also evolved from a local retail bank.
We saw parallels between Kaspi’s story and ours: Kapital Bank is one of Azerbaijan's most prominent retail banks, commanding the country’s largest branch network. The bank had AZN11.5B ($6.7B) in total assets and a loan book of AZN5.1b ($3B), according to its 2025 full year financial statements.
There was a clear opportunity to expand Kapital Bank’s offering, riding the wave of digitalization coming across the country. At the same time, other businesses within the holding, particularly in payments and e-commerce, were developing separately. It made sense to bring these businesses together, connecting customer journeys into one seamless experience.
Today, the Bir ecosystem brings together disparate but complementary banking, e-commerce, payments and fintech businesses under a single umbrella.