In an exclusive interview at the Silk Road Finance & Technology Forum in Tashkent, one of the architects of Uzbekistan’s payments organization reflects on the market’s leap from bank cards to digital finance, what it still needs to lead Central Asia, and why she believes the next contest will be won over data, not payments.

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When Naima Mirzayeva speaks about Uzbekistan’s financial system, she is describing something she helped build. Across more than 30 years in financial services, including over 25 in card payments and electronic transactions, she has worked on the machinery that carried the country from a cash economy toward a digital one. She held senior roles at banks including Agrobank, Ipoteka Bank, Aloqabank, and Kapitalbank, and in the mid-2000s helped develop the methodology for interbank settlements through the Unified Republican Processing Centre, established in 2004 to connect Uzbekistan’s banks under a single bank-card system. Today she sits on the Supervisory Board of Click, one of the country’s leading fintech companies.

Speaking with Tech Revolt at the Silk Road Finance & Technology Forum, where she represents Click, Mirzayeva traced how far the market has travelled, what it still needs to become Central Asia’s fintech hub, and why she believes the next contest will be decided by data rather than payments. Her answers appear below in her own words.

You have watched Uzbekistan’s payments system evolve from bank cards and interbank settlements to today’s digital financial services. What, in your view, has changed most significantly?

The biggest change, in my view, has not been in the technology itself, but in the role of the customer.

In the past, the financial system was built primarily around banking infrastructure. People had a card and access to a bank branch, along with set opening hours and a defined range of available transactions. In practice, customers had to adapt to the system.

Today, the opposite is true: financial services have to adapt to people. Users expect to be able to do everything immediately, on their smartphone, at any time and in just a few steps. The market has learned to meet that expectation.

At the same time, payment is gradually becoming less of a standalone action. When people buy a product, pay for parking, access a government service or use an online service, they do not want to think about the infrastructure behind the payment. It should simply work.

To me, that is the most important change: we have moved from digitizing individual banking transactions to creating a digital financial experience built around people’s everyday lives.

The Central Bank is now playing an active role in developing digital financial infrastructure, not only regulating fintech. What does that mean for private companies such as Click?

I see this as a natural stage in the market’s development.

There is no point in every company building the same infrastructure independently, over and over again. The better the shared layer of core payment mechanisms, common standards and secure data exchange works, the more opportunities it creates for private businesses.

A fintech company’s task is then no longer to rebuild the underlying infrastructure. It can direct more resources toward the customer: making services simpler, faster and easier to understand, and creating new products.

However, the division of roles has to be clearly divided.

In my opinion the regulator’s role is to provide a reliable and open foundation for the market, available to its participants on clear for everyone terms. And private companies then build on that foundation and compete on the strength of their product quality, technology and customer experience.

This is a healthy model for the whole market: infrastructure brings participants together, while services compete.

Setting regulation aside, what does Uzbekistan still need to build, specifically in terms of infrastructure, to become a fully fledged regional fintech hub for Central Asia?

Becoming a regional fintech hub takes more than having a large number of banking apps or successful fintech companies. What matters is how easily the different parts of the market can work together.

First, the country needs well-developed shared payments infrastructure. Banks, payment providers and fintech services need to interact seamlessly. From the customer’s perspective, it shouldn’t make much difference which bank holds their account or which service they use to complete a transaction.

Second, there need to be unified, user-friendly mechanisms for sharing data with the customer’s consent. This is the foundation for Open Banking and for the development of new financial products. A company should not have to develop a separate integration with every participant in the market.

Third, digital identification. If person can verify their identity securely online, it becomes much faster and easier way to access financial and other digital services.

Another important area is connectivity with neighboring markets. If we are talking about a regional hub, a fintech company created in Uzbekistan should be able to expand into other Central Asian markets relatively easily and work with payments, transfers and local partners.

To my mind, a true fintech hub is a country where a product can be created once and then scaled much faster.

You have been involved in e-commerce and electronic payments in Uzbekistan since 2012. What else needs to change in people’s habits before the digital economy can enter its next stage?

We have already learned how to pay online. Now we need to learn how to navigate a broader digital financial environment that goes beyond payments and transfers.

Much of the digitalization started with paying for everyday things: mobile services, utilities, P2P transfers and purchases. That was an essential first stage.

The next stage comes when people use digital tools to manage their finances as a whole: planning expenses, building savings, paying for recurring services, shopping online, and using government and commercial platforms.

The same applies to businesses. For a small business owner, digital payments matter for more than letting customers pay by card or QR code — they should also help the owner better understand the business’s turnover, keep records, work with customers and grow the business.

At some point, cashless payments should no longer be seen as a separate option.

The next stage will begin when digital becomes people’s natural first choice, rather than an alternative to cash.

What challenges and costs of operating in a market where part of the population remains underserved by banking are typically underestimated from outside Uzbekistan?

People often assume that developing a good app is enough to solve the problem. In practice, the hardest work begins after the technology is launched.

If someone has had little previous experience with digital financial services, simply putting a button in front of them is not enough. You need to explain how the product works, build trust, guide them through their first transaction, and provide support if something goes wrong.

Security requires particularly significant investment. The more new people join the system, the more actively fraudsters try to exploit it. Anti-fraud systems, customer support and user education therefore need to grow alongside the user base.

Financial inclusion requires long-term investment in infrastructure, security, support and trust. This is the part of the work that is often invisible from the outside.

Where do fintech companies and banks in Uzbekistan genuinely compete today, rather than complement each other, and how does that competition affect the market?

The most visible competition today is over which app people will use every day.

Payments, transfers, bills, purchases and services for businesses were once largely separate areas. Banks focused on their products, while payment companies focused on theirs.

Those boundaries are now becoming far less distinct. Banks are developing strong mobile apps and digital services. Fintech companies, in turn, are expanding their range of offerings and becoming full-fledged digital platforms.

As a result, competition is no longer limited to a specific financial transaction. It is now about the customer experience: who can meet their needs faster, whom they trust, and which app they will return to tomorrow.

This competition benefits users. It pushes the market to develop faster, simplify products and improve the quality of service.

At the same time, banks and fintech companies cannot entirely replace one another. They have different strengths. A mature market therefore depends on both competition and partnership.

What matters more, I think, is that companies compete through their products, rather than through their ability to restrict access to their infrastructure. The easier it is for market participants to work together, the stronger the market as a whole becomes.

Having watched the cashless economy develop since the era of interbank settlements, what next stage of the market do you think remains underestimated today?

For a long time, we measured the financial market’s development by the number of cards, payments and transfers, and by the growth in cashless transactions. That was the right approach: the digital foundation itself had to be built first.

But the next stage, in my view, will be less about how people pay and more about what the financial system can offer them based on their actual economic activity.

Today, every payment generates data. For individuals, that data forms a record of their income and spending. For business owners, it reflects turnover, sales, seasonality and the movement of funds.

When used responsibly and only with the customer’s consent, this data can enable the development of far more precisely tailored financial products.

For example, it is not always easy for a small business to demonstrate its actual economic activity through traditional means. But its digital transaction history can already reveal a great deal about how the business operates.

The same applies to individual users. A financial service can do more than simply show them a list of transactions: it can help them understand their spending, identify potential problems early and make better decisions.

In other words, we are gradually moving from digital payments to managing finances digitally.

And I believe this is where the next major competition will take place: not over processing one more payment, but over the ability to genuinely help individuals and businesses make better financial decisions.

It is a fitting note from someone who watched the first cashless rails go in. For Mirzayeva, Uzbekistan has largely finished building the foundation. The more interesting question, she suggests, is what gets built on top of it.

Naima Mirzayeva is a Member of the Supervisory Board of Click, with more than 30 years in financial services and over 25 in card payments and electronic transactions. She has held senior positions at Agrobank, Ipoteka Bank, EOPC, Aloqabank, and Kapitalbank.