About Banco.az

Banco.az

Banco.az is an Azerbaijani-language specialist portal based in Baku, Azerbaijan, devoted to banking and finance. It is a digital-native publication whose core product is not only news but data: continuously updated rankings of Azerbaijani banks by assets, capital, credit portfolio, deposit portfolio and profit; bank-by-bank currency buy and sell rates; and comparable tables for insurance companies by premiums collected and claims paid. Alongside these reference tables, Banco.az publishes banking news, research articles, interviews and a video strand under the name BancoTV. For Azerbaijani readers comparing loans, deposits and banks, it functions as the sector's specialist reference point.

The portal's standing is visible in the way other Azerbaijani media use it: peer outlets republish its rankings with the credit line "Banco.az reports" and name its researchers as authors — for example, Icma.az carrying Banco.az's top-five bank profit rankings for the third quarter of 2026 under the byline of Banco.az author Gülnar Əhmədli. This profile is based on the portal's own pages and on those third-party uses of its data.

Identity and specialisation

Banco.az publishes from Baku in Azerbaijani. Where most Azerbaijani portals are generalists, Banco.az is built around a single sector: banks, the Central Bank of Azerbaijan, credit and deposit markets, exchange rates, insurance and personal finance. Its homepage is dominated not by headlines but by tables, which is the clearest statement of its purpose: it is a data service for the banking market with a newsroom attached, rather than a news site with a finance page. Its article categories, visible in its archive structure, include Bank, Araşdırmalar (Research), İnvestisiya (Investment), Müsahibə (Interview), Gündəm (Agenda), Maraqlı (Of interest), Faydalı məlumatlar (Useful information) and BancoTV.

No verified founding date or ownership record for Banco.az could be established from open sources, and this profile does not invent one. Its researchers publish under their own names — Gülnar Əhmədli is the byline on its ranking research — which gives its data products an identifiable authorship unusual among Azerbaijani finance sites.

Bank rankings and data tables

The portal's signature content is its periodic rankings of Azerbaijani banks compiled from the banks' published financial indicators. The homepage presents top-five tables by assets (led, in the version observed, by PAŞA Bank, followed by Kapital Bank and Xalq Bank), by capital, by credit portfolio, by deposit portfolio and by profit, with the figures updated as new reporting periods are published. Its archive shows the rhythm of the product: rankings for the third quarter of 2026 by deposit portfolio, credit portfolio and assets, "the five largest banks in Azerbaijan by assets", "the five banks the population trusted most with deposits in nine months", and "the five banks the population borrowed most from". These rankings are widely syndicated: other portals republish them with attribution, making Banco.az a data wholesaler to the wider Azerbaijani news ecosystem as well as a destination in its own right.

Currency rates and insurance data

A second reference service is the portal's table of bank currency rates, listing buy and sell prices bank by bank — in the version observed, dollar rates from institutions including Ziraat Bank Azərbaycan, Unibank, TuranBank, Bank Respublika and PAŞA Bank, clustered tightly around the manat's official parity. For readers exchanging currency, the table allows instant comparison of which bank offers the better rate on the day. The portal extends the same comparative approach to insurance, tabulating insurance companies by premiums collected (yığımlar) and claims paid (ödənişlər), with PAŞA Sığorta and PAŞA Həyat at the head of the observed table, followed by Atəşgah Həyat, Atəşgah Sığorta and İpək Yolu Sığorta. Rankings of insurers by premiums and by payments are a regular part of its publishing cycle.

News and research coverage

Around the data core, Banco.az runs a conventional financial newsroom. It reports Central Bank decisions and exchange-rate announcements, bank results and sector statistics — "the banking sector's assets grew by more than 12 percent", "banks' net profit approaches one billion manats", "the amount of problem loans has slightly decreased" — and it republishes relevant international rating actions, such as Fitch's affirmation of the ratings of the International Bank of Azerbaijan, Kapital Bank and PAŞA Bank. Its research strand works the consumer angle: a study of which banks offered the lowest cash-loan rates, for example, found Yelo Bank at 8.9 percent and Bank BTB at 18 percent at the extremes of the market in February 2026, with the caveat, printed by the portal itself, that terms vary with salary, collateral and term. General economic news with a financial bearing — gold and silver production, car production, mortgage lending through the state line, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development's growth forecast for Azerbaijan — fills out the agenda file.

The portal's output is not confined to Azerbaijani or to news format. It republishes full international rating-agency commentary in English — a Fitch Ratings release affirming the issuer ratings of the International Bank of Azerbaijan at 'BB' and of Kapital Bank and PAŞA Bank at 'B+', with the agency's reasoning about the sovereign's oil-funded buffers, appeared on Banco.az in complete form — which serves the English-reading segment of the financial community following Azerbaijani banks. Its BancoTV strand adds video presentation to the data product. The archive structure also shows the depth of the back catalogue: category pages run to thousands of entries accumulated over years of daily publication, with rankings refreshed each reporting quarter as the banks publish new financial statements. This regularity matters to the portal's role: because Azerbaijani banks report on a predictable cycle, Banco.az's rankings have become a fixed point in the sector's calendar, anticipated and reused by general news portals that do not compile the figures themselves.

Personal finance and the reader

Much of Banco.az's content is aimed at the individual customer rather than the professional. Its rankings answer the questions Azerbaijani households actually ask: which bank is biggest, which is most profitable, which lends most to the population, which holds the most deposits. Its consumer-credit research compares the real price of borrowing across the market. Its exchange-rate table serves anyone changing money. In a banking market of more than twenty licensed banks — the sector numbered twenty-three commercial banks plus the Baku branch of Bank Melli Iran in the 2023 rankings republished from Azerbaijani sources — such comparison tools have a clear practical function, and they explain why general portals lift Banco.az's tables so readily.

Language and audience

Banco.az publishes in Azerbaijani. Its audience combines banking professionals and finance followers with the much larger public that uses its rankings and rate tables for personal decisions. It distributes through search and social media — it maintains Facebook, Instagram and Telegram presences, linked from its articles — in the portal-based news environment that has replaced print as Azerbaijan's main information channel.

Regulatory and market environment

The portal operates under Azerbaijan's Law on Media of 2022 and its Media Registry for online outlets. Its subject matter is shaped by the structure of Azerbaijani banking supervision: banks publish the financial indicators from which Banco.az compiles its rankings, and the Central Bank of Azerbaijan's official rates anchor its currency coverage. The portal's data journalism thus depends on, and republishes in usable form, the disclosure regime of the sector it covers.

What is not publicly documented

Open sources do not document Banco.az's founding year, legal owner, editor-in-chief or audience size, and no international media directory profiles it. What is documented — by its own pages and by the attribution practices of peer outlets — is its product, its authorship of widely reused rankings, and its current activity. This profile confines itself to that record.

Summary

Banco.az is a Baku-based, Azerbaijani-language banking and finance portal whose distinctive product is comparative data: bank rankings by assets, capital, loans, deposits and profit, bank-by-bank currency rates, and insurance league tables, wrapped in financial news, research and interviews. Cited and republished across the Azerbaijani web, it serves both the finance profession and the saving, borrowing and exchanging public.