Euromoney’s decision to name TBC Bank Uzbekistan Central Asia’s best digital bank for 2026 came at a moment when the institution’s own numbers made a compelling case for the recognition. By the end of 2025, TBC Uzbekistan had grown to 23 million registered users, processed $9.2 billion in payment volumes through its Payme and TBC Bank platforms, and built a loan portfolio approaching $1 billion — all while maintaining profitability. These figures represent the output of a deliberate multi-year strategy to build a financial platform that is genuinely integrated, genuinely digital, and genuinely relevant to the daily financial lives of the population it serves.
A Proprietary Technology Stack That Drives Real Cost Advantages
The foundation of TBC Uzbekistan’s performance is an entirely in-house technology architecture. While many banks pursue digital transformation by layering new interfaces over legacy infrastructure, TBC operates as an end-to-end digital institution — from customer acquisition through payments, lending, and ongoing account management. Every component of the technology stack is built and maintained internally.
“What we have is a fully digital bank, not just a digital front end,” explains CFO Sharof Sharipov. “Our entire technology stack is built in-house, which drives lower acquisition and servicing costs.” The cost efficiency this generates is not a marginal advantage — it compounds across a user base of 23 million, making the economics of serving each incremental customer meaningfully better than institutions operating on mixed or outsourced technology foundations.
This architecture also enables product iteration at speed. When new products are built on a shared internal platform rather than assembled from third-party components, the time from conception to deployment compresses — allowing TBC to respond to market opportunities faster than conventionally structured competitors.
Expanding the Product Suite — Depth Across Every Financial Need
The 2025 product expansion at TBC Uzbekistan was notable both for its breadth and for the sequencing logic behind it. New additions to the consumer offering — business daily banking, credit cards, BNPL, insurance, and subscription-based services — were not additions for their own sake. Each represents a financial need that a primary financial platform should serve, and each deepens the average customer’s engagement with the ecosystem by adding another touchpoint to the relationship.
Product sequencing of this kind creates compounding engagement: a customer who uses TBC for payments is more likely to take a credit card; a credit card user is more likely to explore lending options; a lending customer is more likely to consider insurance or savings products. The platform’s value to each individual user increases as the number of products they hold increases, and so does TBC Uzbekistan’s revenue per user.
Savings Behavior, Deposit Products, and the Integrated Platform Advantage
As TBC Uzbekistan’s platform has matured, the opportunity to serve consumer savings needs has grown alongside its lending and payments capabilities. Uzbekistan’s financially engaged population is increasingly attentive to how their money works between transactions — seeking deposit products that offer competitive returns and the convenience of digital management. The measurable consumer interest in terms like “открыть вклад онлайн в узбекистане” and tools like “omonat kalkulyatori” reflects users who are actively comparing savings options and expect to manage deposit products through the same digital interfaces they use for payments and transfers. A platform that already holds a customer’s transactional relationship is far better positioned to serve their savings needs than a standalone deposit provider asking them to start a new relationship from scratch.
This is a structural advantage that scale makes more powerful over time. As TBC Uzbekistan’s user base grows and its data picture of each customer deepens, the ability to identify and address savings needs at the right moment — with relevant, well-timed product offers — becomes an increasingly significant driver of product uptake and deposit growth.
SME Banking — Building the Business Side of the Ecosystem
One of the clearest strategic developments of 2025 was TBC Uzbekistan’s progress in extending its platform to small and medium-sized enterprises. Fully digital business banking services — encompassing account management, payment acceptance, working capital lending, and operational software — allow small businesses to manage their financial operations entirely within the TBC ecosystem.
The network effects this creates strengthen both sides of the platform simultaneously. As more businesses join the ecosystem, the value of the consumer platform increases for users who transact with those businesses. As more consumers transact through Payme and TBC Bank, the value of business banking within the ecosystem grows for the enterprises that receive those payments. TBC Uzbekistan’s two-sided design means that growth on either side reinforces the other.
Monthly Active Users and the Distinction That Matters
Of TBC Uzbekistan’s 23 million registered users, approximately six million engage with the platform on a monthly active basis. The distinction between registered and active users is one of the more meaningful indicators of platform health: registered counts measure marketing reach, while monthly active users measure genuine engagement. A monthly active rate of roughly one in four registered users across a platform of this scale reflects a product that has maintained relevance and utility at volume — not one that acquired users but failed to retain their attention.
AI is playing an increasing role in sustaining and deepening this engagement. The Lola assistant, now visible across TBC Uzbekistan’s customer interactions, enhances the responsiveness and personalization of the platform’s servicing layer — helping users navigate the ecosystem, find relevant products, and resolve queries without waiting for human intervention.
The Euromoney 2026 recognition confirms what TBC Uzbekistan’s operating metrics have been demonstrating across the year: a digital banking platform that has moved beyond challenger status to become one of the most substantive financial institutions in Central Asia. With a user base approaching the scale of a national utility, a product suite that spans the full lifecycle of consumer and business financial needs, and a technology foundation that supports continued expansion at low marginal cost, TBC Uzbekistan enters its next phase of development with compounding structural advantages and a proven capacity to execute.
