General information

Population

37.8M

Online population

33.1M

Currency

UZS

Market overview

Population - 33.1M

At the start of 2026, 50.8 % of Uzbekistan’s population lived in urban centres, whereas 49.2 % lived in rural areas.

Internet penetration - 89%

There were 33.1M internet users in Uzbekistan at the start of 2026.

FinTech Outlook: Trends, Insight & Technology

Uzbekistan is emerging as one of Central Asia’s most dynamic fintech markets, leapfrogging from cash and branch banking into integrated digital ecosystems.

Uzum and TBC Uzbekistan lead the shift: homegrown Uzum combines e-commerce, banking, payments and the country’s largest BNPL platform, reports 20 million monthly users, and raised more than $130 million in March 2026 at a reported $2.3 billion valuation.

TBC Uzbekistan brings together its digital bank, Payme, BNPL, insurance and merchant platform BILLZ, reaching 5.8 million monthly active users by March 2026. Local players Click, Paynet and Alif add further depth, spanning P2P payments, cash-to-digital services and Islamic finance.

Islamic fintech adds another distinctive growth avenue. Players such as Alif are using digital platforms to offer instalment financing structured around Islamic-finance principles, giving Uzbekistan an opportunity to develop Sharia-compliant financial services through fintech rather than relying solely on traditional Islamic banking.

Regulation is now catching up: the Central Bank’s 2026–2030 fintech strategy plans open banking, unified QR payments, account-to-account transfers and a national payment switch, while a March 2026 relaxation of data-localisation rules opened the door to services such as Apple Pay and Google Pay. Uzbekistan is therefore evolving less like Europe’s open-banking markets and more like Kazakhstan’s Kaspi model, where commerce and payments attract users and financial services turn that engagement into lending, deposits and broader financial ecosystems.

Uzbekistan is taking an unusual route to financial inclusion: digitising banking without removing the local intermediary. The country’s mahallas—neighbourhood institutions that connect households with the state—now host a network of around 2,500 “mahalla bankers” and 9,000 local assistant-agents, who help residents understand financial products, use mobile banking and turn small-business ideas into credit applications. Behind them sits an increasingly digital system linking applications with banking, employment and tax data. In 2025, the programme helped 1.3 million previously uncarded people obtain a bank card, giving the model genuine national scale.

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Paynet : From Payment App to Payment Infrastructure

Paynet’s acquisition of Humo marks a striking shift in Uzbekistan’s fintech landscape: a private payments company now controls one of the country’s two main domestic card-processing networks. Combined with Paynet’s digital services and roughly 37,000 physical payment points, the deal creates a vertically integrated player stretching from cash collection and everyday payments to the infrastructure processing card transactions. More broadly, it shows how Uzbekistan’s fintech transformation is moving beyond new consumer apps to reshape who owns the financial rails themselves.

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