With Baiterek Hackathon happening in only a few short days, what do you have to know?

“I don’t like banks anyway,” muttered a bank executive as he spoke about the reality of being intrinsically entrenched in the banking industry, and by extension, in the larger fintech space.

With so many obstacles that banks face today, barriers such as scrutiny coupled with piles upon piles of regulation have put so much pressure on banks to keep up with the times. Adil Nurgozhin, Chief Digital and Innovation Officer of Baiterek, lamented that the fintech ecosystem in Central Asia has fallen two to three years behind.

“Banks are huge. They’re aggressive, but they are heavily regulated. So the compliance people are the most important people in the banks right now, no longer the loan department,” he added. For this reason, most banks are no longer able to focus on rendering unique and innovative services because of the pressures of compliance requirements.

With banks like The House Construction Savings Bank of Kazakhstan (HCSBK) whose primary driving force is to support the sustainable economic development of the Republic of Kazakhstan in order to implement public policies and achieve goals set by the 2050 strategy, being able to achieve things has become harder to come by.

HCSBK, a subsidiary organisation of Baiterek National Management Holding where Nurgozhin works as a Chief Digital and Innovation Officer, is trying to change that. One initiative that the organisation is spearheading is the Baiterek Hackathon: a programme whose main goal is to assemble the best thinkers to come up with solutions to pre-existing problems in the region.

What exactly is the Baiterek Hackathon?

Baiterek Hackathon is a tech programme in Kazakhstan that seeks to gather the most ambitious and talented developers and problem solvers in the vibrant region of Central Asia. The objective of this programme is simple: to come up with cutting-edge and innovative solutions to address problems faced by everyday people in the region.

The key problems that the programme seeks to address are issues in areas such as saving, consumer education, banking experience, and other similar problems being dealt with by people in the region, particularly problems in the fintech space.

The programme will be focusing on these four particular challenges:

1.) Savings — how we might help users save better, track their savings, and proactively remind them to be more active savers.
2.) Consumer Education — how we can simplify bank processes to make it easier for customers to better understand all the products and services offered by the banks.
3.) Enriching experiences — how we can make the experience of waiting in line an enriching experience, one that consumers will be able to talk about to their friends and will have a positive experience with.
4.) Others — How we might improve transparency internally and promote cross-collaboration among all bankrupt units.

Also read: Baiterek Hackathon: pushing for solutions in finance for everyday people in Central Asia

The Baiterek Hackathon is open to programmers, designers, business experts, and everyone in between. With teams composed of 3 to 5 members, participants are encouraged to co-create and innovate solutions to these pressing problems.

Co-organised by HCSBK, Baiterek, and Qaztech Ventures, the Baiterek Hackathon is slated to happen on November 29 to December 1.

With 2,000,000 Tenge up for grabs, the Baiterek Hackathon hopes to solve current fintech issues in Central Asia using the vigor and the fresh perspectives of talented and ambitious developers from the country’s tech ecosystem and beyond.

Here, we take a closer look at the ideas and insights that inform, mitigate, and inspire the programme to ultimately help out the people of Central Asia.

Going in-depth with Baiterek Hackathon

In an interview with e27, Nurgozhin argued the importance of producing a corporate outcome in programmes like the Baiterek Hackathon. “I would like them to have this kind of exercise more often. Ideally, it should turn into a lab or something similar, and would lead to a corporate VC fund,” Nurgozhin remarked.

He said that while this is the long term outcome that the programme is trying to gear for its participants, the more immediate goal is as simple as being able to teach participants to communicate with each other. To help them learn to identify the challenges between corporates and startups, and ultimately work together to come up with solutions.

Nurgozhin, who has extensive experience as a venture capitalist for the last 10 years having been a partner at I2BF Global which is an American VC headquartered in New York, now works towards developing a digital agenda for Baiterek.

Through this, they adopted a digital strategy that allowed them to dig further into business processes, and automate whenever possible especially in areas around the data processing infrastructure such as mining data, collecting, processing, among many others—solutions that are often used internally.

Of course, it goes without saying that these efforts need to be pushed even further. “Strategically, we want to have a corporate system in place. But for that to happen, we need to [communicate it] again and again until everyone memorises and understands it, and hopefully learns to extract value out of it,” Nurgozhin said, highlighting the role of Baiterek as a facilitator for the exchange of ideas that is expected to happen during the said event.

The importance of going regional

“If you look at it actually, you don’t say Kazakhstan. You should say Central Asia,” Nurgozhin mentioned as he addressed the fact that the region is populated by a lot of people with no credit history, and how a big chunk of the economy still uses cash.

“How do they serve that? How do you get these people to trust you so that you could serve them?” he asked, suggesting that the programme is poised to help bridge that gap and foster a platform that people will trust enough to go digital for.

It is in this regard that parallelisms between the Central Asian and the Southeast Asian contexts can be drawn. Nurgozhin likened the cases of Uzbekistan and the Philippines to one another, with the two economies benefitting largely from global remittances. Kyrgyzstan, on the other hand, gets about 30-40% of its GDP from remittances. On top of that, both economies happen to be dealing with their own large unbanked populations.

Congruently, Nurgozhin notes that Kazakhstan finds itself in the same startup path as Singapore, having started in e-commerce, to fintech, and possibly, to deep tech in the future. The difference, however, is that while Southeast Asia enjoys a 63% internet penetration rate, Central Asia lags behind with only 50%.

This is what makes Baiterek Hackathon important: because by convening the best and brightest developers from Central Asia into the Republic of Kazakhstan, a country that stands out in Central Asia with its internet penetration rate of 76%, the region has a strong chance to bridge gaps and empower people to go digital.

It is also worth noting that the startup culture in Kazakhstan is steadily growing especially in the large metropolis of Almaty, which boasts the highest GDP per capita in the country. Additionally, the city is gifted with a lot of talents sprouting from the many universities that populate it.

With all of these variables being taken into consideration, at the end of the day, Nurgozhin is optimistic that initiatives like the Baiterek Hackathon will ultimately turn the tides for Kazakhstan and the rest of Central Asia. For more information, you may visit their official website.

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