Backing Central Asia's Next Winners: The Lens of Investors & Founders

The panel explored how sovereign, venture, and private equity capital each define strategic direction through distinct investment theses, geographic focus, and risk appetite. The central friction: can patient developmental capital and return-driven commercial capital genuinely complement each other? DFI capital moves slowly because it is taxpayer money, while venture and private equity demand faster returns. Speedinvest, which began in Europe before expanding into the Middle East and Africa, exemplifies the tension—return-driven yet acutely aware of its positive impact in emerging markets. Meanwhile, Blackstone—now the largest investor in data centers—warns that AI data center horizons may be too long for some investors to stomach.

This leadership conversation examines how financial centres evolve in practice. What has to be built first? Which financial needs should a new centre solve before it seeks global scale? How can public policy, central-bank oversight and private-sector participation reinforce one another? And what lessons can Uzbekistan draw from centres that have succeeded by evolving with the needs of their people, enterprises and investors?

Geographic scalability is non-negotiable. Qatar Development Bank walks away from geographically capped ventures, betting only on technologies with global or regional horizons, backed by progressive regulation, capability centers, and corridor-building initiatives such as the Startup Qatar program. Capital types must complement—but patience has limits. Sovereign, DFI, and family office capital are being leveraged together in the Middle East, yet the panel conceded that different capital types operate at fundamentally different speeds, and patience. AI is both accelerator and cautionary tale. AI can accelerate startup and SME development, yet the sheer scale of capital flowing into revenue-less ventures—with stakes far larger than past cycles—demands discipline.

As commerce turns cross‑border and real‑time, trust becomes the currency of connectivity. This panel examines how secure, interoperable payment networks — tokenisation, fraud intelligence and shared standards — can turn Central Asia's growing digital economy into a gateway for regional and global trade, giving consumers and businesses the confidence to transact beyond borders and plug the region into the world's commerce flows.

Can central banks simultaneously defend price stability, embrace disruptive technology, and preserve the singleness of money — all while public confidence in institutions erodes under populist pressure from both left and right? Governor Kganyago's answer reframes the tension: trust and inflation are not separate problems but the same problem. When a central bank fails on price stability, trust collapses with it — and the public doesn't merely dislike inflation; it resents the cost of living, meaning even successful disinflation leaves a residue of institutional scepticism.

The panel — bringing together CLS, Hedera, Barclays, Euroclear, and Fireblocks — surfaced a sharp tension at the heart of the tokenisation discourse: the conflation of atomicity with instantaneousness. Atomic settlement, defined as an "all-or-nothing" mechanism ensuring principal safety by linking payment and asset legs, is neither new nor exclusive to DLT. Euroclear settles securities with full DvP finality within scheduled cycles, and CLS processes FX with irrevocable atomicity between 7:00 AM and 9:00 AM each day. The friction point is whether DLT merely replicates existing safety or genuinely unlocks new settlement paradigms — and the panelists were divided on where the breakthrough actually lies.