Uzbekistan’s fintech market is often compared to Kazakhstan’s five years ago. But that is a convenient illusion. Products that took off in Almaty regularly stall in Tashkent. A completely different demographic and developing open banking create a unique launchpad not seen in neighboring countries.
We spoke with Oleg Kachalin, product expert and co-founder of Rocket Tech, about why traditional banking is doomed to become a mere storefront, where the line between in-house development and ready-made solutions lies, and how the battle of ecosystems is changing user experience.
Is the Uzbek user ready for complex products like investments or advanced savings banking? Where is the main product and mental barrier for the audience, especially given the government’s recent initiatives to formalize the economy and force digitalization?
I’ll start with the main mental barrier. It is a deeply rooted habit of tangible assets. Traditionally, people here keep money in cash or invest in real estate.
Abstract numbers in a brokerage account or a complex investment product still cause distrust. It is psychologically difficult for a person to trade “real” money for a virtual asset with floating returns. Therefore, selling classic investments head-on in this market does not work yet.
But two factors are actively breaking this ice. First, the state’s strict steps to formalize the economy. The government is mandating digital transactions for large deals. Want to buy an apartment from a developer or a new car at a dealership? Pay only by bank transfer. This forces people to pull money out from under the mattress and forms a basic habit of trusting a bank account.
The second and main factor is the unique demographics. The average age in Uzbekistan today is about 27. This is a massive layer of an incredibly young audience. They are not weighed down by old conservative patterns or the traumatic financial experiences of past decades. They think through smartphone screens.
Therefore, we break through the product barrier exclusively through radical UX simplification. For a young audience to adopt complex products, banks must not dump order books and confusing yield charts on them.
Gamification and micro-steps are needed. A complex savings product should look like an auto-replenishing piggy bank with daily, transparent interest. Investments should look like buying a mutual fund share in one click using spare change from a coffee purchase. Traditional banking has become a commodity. The winner now is the one who takes a heavy financial instrument, cuts away all the excess, and packages it into two clear buttons, proving to the user that digital is safer and more profitable than cash.
However, the culture of personal relationships and cash still dominates. How can product mechanics and UX solutions build digital trust among those just learning to use a smartphone for payments?
The scenario here is universal: convenience exclusively drives digitalization. As soon as a resident in a remote region can easily and safely get a loan or order delivery in two clicks, digital trust will form automatically. In Kazakhstan, the share of cashless transactions has already approached 86–88%—and this happened not through coercion, but thanks to seamless and convenient UX.
Uzbekistan will follow a similar path, but likely with earlier regulatory intervention. In the digital world, cash settlements become physically inconvenient. The choice comes down to two options: either fast, transparent, and safe digitally, or slow, with risks and offline communication for cash. The divide will fall along social lines. A thirty-year-old city dweller will tap a couple of buttons in an app, while a resident of a remote village will stay in their comfortable cash environment for now. But progress will inevitably take its toll.
Let’s move to the technical side. Banks often try to develop all software in-house, avoiding tenders, but at the cost of long releases. At the same time, Rocket Tech is actively introducing its own ready-made products from the Ready Bank ecosystem to the market. Where is the reasonable line between in-house development and out-of-the-box solutions today?
Let’s separate the digitalization of services and internal automation. Many banks in Uzbekistan are currently in a hard catch-up mode. Some lack even basic CRM systems, and client records are sometimes kept in simple spreadsheets.
Writing everything in-house from scratch in such conditions is a utopia. You hire developers, inflate the budget, and the release gets pushed back a year and a half. The market moves far ahead during that time. Competitors will not wait for you.
That is why we at Rocket Tech took the path of our own platform solutions. First, we launch the Discovery service for deep pre-project analytics. Then we offer Ready Bank—a ready-made “box.” Why should a bank spend 12–18 months building basic infrastructure?
We provide an already tested foundation: onboarding, scoring, credit, and transaction pipelines. The bank takes this base and deploys a digital foundation exponentially faster. And it throws its in-house team at the most important thing—unique customer experience and UX add-ons.
The winner is the one who knows how to cut corners. They buy a ready-made B2B solution and spend their energy on features the client interacts with every day. Otherwise, you just reinvent the wheel, constantly suffering from a talent shortage.
Speaking of business models, many players in Uzbekistan still rely on payments and transfers. But the niche is overheated by strong players like Click, Payme, and Paynet. How can banks retain customers beyond that?
Transfers are a basic utility. They will inevitably hit a margin ceiling or face strict regulation. The main challenge for Uzbek banks lies in developed open banking. Customers are no longer tied to one bank: they easily integrate cards into third-party mobile apps.
In these conditions, the only way to grow is to create unique differentiators and build closed ecosystems. A classic battle of ecosystems is unfolding: the more daily tasks a client solves within one product, the higher the chance of retaining them. In Kazakhstan, the market has already polarized into mass superapps (Kaspi, Halyk, Freedom) and narrow niche banks for the premium segment. For the mass market, the ecosystem approach is currently proving the most effective.
Another notable trend is Islamic finance. Can it become full-fledged competition to classic loans and installment plans?
A classic loan is the consumption of future income in the present. It is effective only when the borrower’s income is growing. Statistics show that only about 20% of users consciously manage their debt load, while the majority risk failing to handle their debts. Banks price these default risks into the interest rate.
Islamic fintech offers a different paradigm: the bank acts not as a moneylender, but as a partner sharing the risks and ownership of the asset. This is a strong ethical construct. Economically, however, Islamic products often cost the consumer slightly more than traditional ones right now. As the niche develops, specialized scoring may emerge that evaluates a person as a partner, which will reduce the cost of service. I believe this sector will grow, attracting more than just a religious audience, but it will likely remain a large niche rather than a complete replacement for classic lending.
With growing economies comes the question of regional integration. Will we see a seamless fintech ecosystem between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, as happened in e-com thanks to Ozon and Wildberries?
Regulatory and infrastructural synchronization must become the foundation for seamlessness. The ideal scenario is the introduction of digital currencies (digital tenge, sum). Integration at this level will allow banks to quickly deploy cross-border services. For example, Kazakhstan and China are already actively testing payment bridges with the digital yuan. At the transaction level for tourism and business, this seamlessness will appear in the coming years.
But at the level of complex products, the barriers are still too high. The initial development will likely also go through e-commerce: local marketplaces will begin regional expansion into neighboring markets. But this requires developed 3PL logistics, warehouses, fulfillment centers, and clear customs rules.
What is the main gap in the Uzbek market right now? What is missing for a product breakthrough, excluding established unicorns like the Uzum platform, whose valuation exceeded a billion dollars in the spring of 2024?
The presence of the first unicorn proves that the market is ready technologically and for investment. The question is different: do the banks themselves need innovation? Development moves in a spiral—new services form a habit, and users start demanding the same quality from conservative players.
The gap lies not in technology, but in visionaries. Large bureaucratic machines avoid risks. A breakthrough happens when a leader emerges who is ready to take responsibility for bold experiments and inevitable failures. In Kazakhstan, Timur Turlov and Mikhail Lomtadze became such drivers—leaders inseparable from their products. Uzbekistan needs similar visionaries. Either startups will show efficiency and scale through partnerships, or leaders capable of pushing innovation will emerge within corporations.
Final question—highlight one technology currently making waves that will most change the Central Asian market over a five-year horizon. Will it be open banking, digital identification, or something else?
Open banking in its current form will definitely not be the driver. In Kazakhstan, the National Bank has already run it in test mode. Technically, everything worked perfectly—cards linked, data flowed. But business logic resists: no bank wants to voluntarily hand over a client to someone else’s ecosystem.
The real breakthrough is GovTech. Digital government services.
Right now, we are at the first stage. The bank simply acts as a convenient storefront. You open the app, re-register a car, open a sole proprietorship, or get a certificate. That is great, but it is only the beginning.
The real shift will happen when government services become the core for new financial products. The state creates open APIs and returns data control to the people themselves.
Imagine: a bank seamlessly pulls your tax data, citizen profile, and real estate registries. And issues a mortgage in three minutes. Without a single physical certificate. A loan for a small business is approved instantly based on real turnover confirmed by the state.
The bank stops being just a wallet or a middleman. It becomes an invisible assistant. In the next five years, leadership will be seized by those ecosystems that are the first to turn this ocean of government data into hyper-personalized services.