News & Views Podcast: How Uzbekistan Built Open Banking Before the West

Editorial Calendar Exclusive Content Fintech Ecosystems News & Views Podcast: How Uzbekistan Built Open Banking Before the West If you work in fintech, you’ve probably heard a lot about the same familiar markets. But Uzbekistan is still flying under the radar—and that may be exactly why it matters. In a recent conversation withOliver Hughes, head of international business atTBC Group, we explored why this fast-changing Central Asian market is attracting serious attention from digital banking and payments players.What makes Uzbekistan interesting isn’t just its size.

It’s the combination of rapid population growth, a young digitally native audience, a sophisticated local payments ecosystem, and a regulator that is actively helping modernize the market. In this post, you’ll learn why Uzbekistan is different, how its payments infrastructure works, and what that means for the future of banking, lending, and AI-driven financial services. Uzbekistan’s FinTech Opportunity Starts with Demographics One of the first things that stands out about Uzbekistan is its scale.

The country is approaching 40 million people, and that population is not static—it’s growing by roughly 600,000 to 800,000 people every year. That kind of demographic momentum matters in fintech because payments, banking, and digital financial services all become more valuable as more people enter the formal economy.Just as important, the population is young. Hughes pointed out that each new cohort is more digitally native than the last, which creates a natural advantage for mobile-first products.

If you’re building a financial app, younger users tend to adopt faster, transact more often, and move more comfortably between services.That dynamic changes the economics of growth. Instead of fighting to convert a mature market that is already saturated, fintech companies in Uzbekistan can expand as the market itself expands. More users, more digital adoption, and more transaction volume all feed into each other.Uzbekistan is