Tashkent, Uzbekistan – 19 November 2024. TBC Uzbekistan, the leading digital banking ecosystem in Central Asia, unveils its own payments processing centre. Building out this essential piece of infrastructure and bringing it in-house will provide the foundation for accelerating the pace of new product and services launches, as TBC continues to grow and expand in Central Asia’s largest market by population.
This state-of-the-art processing centre, custom-made for TBC Uzbekistan, will give the company full control over all of its payment processing workstreams, enabling TBC to bring new products to market faster and with greater efficiency. Its launch is an important competitive advantage in TBC Uzbekistan’s strategy to scale efficiently and continue to rapidly build out and diversify the digital ecosystem’s product offering for both individuals and businesses.
The new processing centre will fully support all of TBC’s payment transactions, such as peer-to-peer transfers, card payments and QR code-enabled payments. It will also provide TBC with additional data analytics capabilities, helping the digital banking powerhouse to better understand customers’ and merchants’ pain points and then leverage this insight in the development of new consumer and SME products, such as a full suite of acquiring products.
Nika Kurdiani, CEO of TBC Group operations in Uzbekistan, commented: “We continue to invest in our infrastructure and the launch of our own, in-house payments processing centre is an important milestone for TBC Uzbekistan, highlighting our ambitious plans for the future. By building out this foundational element of infrastructure ourselves, we will be able to move even faster and at a bigger scale in developing and bringing new, innovative financial products to Uzbekistan’s exciting and dynamic market”.
The payments processing centre will provide additional flexibility to TBC going forward, e.g. enabling the company to roll out Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal for its customers as soon as those payment methods become available in Uzbekistan, as well as bring other exciting new features to the market quickly.
In addition to strengthening TBC Uzbekistan, which includes TBC Bank Uzbekistan, Payme, and Payme Nasiya, the launch of this new processing centre will also contribute to the development and further diversification of the wider payments infrastructure in Uzbekistan.
About TBC Uzbekistan
TBC Uzbekistan is the leading digital banking ecosystem in Central Asia and part of London-listed TBC Bank Group. TBC Uzbekistan’s success is driven by its purpose-built tech stack, experienced international team and a consumer lending-led product strategy, supported by its first-mover advantage in Central Asia’s largest nation by population. The company continues to expand its innovative, best-in-class product mix, leveraging low retail banking penetration and a rising appetite for modern financial services among the country’s young, growing, and digitally savvy population.
TBC Uzbekistan comprises three high-growth fintech businesses operating in Uzbekistan: TBC UZ, a mobile-only bank; Payme, a digital payments app for individuals and small businesses; and Payme Nasiya (Payme Instalments), a fast-growing instalment credit business.
TBC Uzbekistan reached profitability 2 years after launch – a record time-to-profit among global digital banks, and has since scaled its user base to 17 million unique registered users. In 9M24, the company recorded a net profit of USD 27 million, with its loan and deposit books up 99% and 66% YoY respectively. TBC Bank Uzbekistan is rated ‘BB-’ by Fitch Ratings (equal to Uzbekistan’s country rating) with a Stable Outlook.
