Tashkent became one of a handful of countries to co-host a forum with Singapore’s Global Finance & Technology Network (GFTN) by chance, its chief executive told FStech.

“It was an accident,” said Sopnendu Mohanty, speaking at the sidelines of the Silk Road Finance and Technology Forum in Uzbekistan’s capital. “I was invited to speak here by the world bank when I was still chief fintech officer of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), and the governor of the central bank wanted to meet with me. We met for an hour or so, and we decided to work together.”

GFTN, a non-profit created by MAS in 2024, then worked with the central bank to develop a multi-year strategy to develop a FinTech centre for the country with the aim of becoming a hub for the wider Central Asian region.

This strategy, revealed at the forum on Monday, intends to secure $1 billion in foreign investment in the FinTech sector by 2030 and includes plans for a series of reforms and training programmes in order to achieve it.

Apart from co-developing the strategy, GFTN has a longer-term partnership with the central bank in four areas, Mohanty said: policy development, strategy, capacity building including the training of 5,000 young people at Singaporean universities, and “mind share”, including the Silk Road forum.

Despite not setting out to develop ties with Uzbekistan, there were factors about Tashkent that reminded Mohanty of Singapore, he told FStech. “It is a very well functioning country, which is very Singapore. There is also a very international sense in the city; good people matter.”

Secondly, the central bank has taken a very unique position by making development a focus alongside financial stability, also reminiscent of Singapore, Mohanty said. The final similarity is the country’s focus on developing a “super efficient” financial system though upgrading systems and open banking, he added.

Despite these similarities, Mohanty does not believe the two countries will have to vie for business :“The market is so big, and there’s a multiplier effect if everybody succeeds, because the market can only grow if the capacity to grow exists.”