Central Asia Fintech Group Calls for Unified Financial Rails

Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.uz) — The Central Asian Fintech Association has proposed four priority areas for harmonizing the region’s financial markets: payment interoperability, mutual recognition of digital identification, compatible open banking standards and common principles for data governance. The proposals were presented during a session at the Silk Road Finance and Technology Forum in Tashkent on 25 August.

The session, titled “Building the Open Ecosystem — Rails, Capital & the Rules That Connect Markets,” was moderated by Chek-Chung Fu, director of regulation and policy at the Global Finance & Technology Network. The discussion focused on three elements of an open financial architecture: payment infrastructure, or “rails,” regulatory rules and capital.

Husanhoja Abidov, director of strategy, transformation and project management at the Central Bank of Uzbekistan, said none of the three elements can function independently. He identified interoperability — the ability to connect markets, data and infrastructure across countries — as the region’s main constraint.

According to Abidov, the Central Bank intends to allow innovation to develop first and introduce regulation proportionately as risks and scale increase, rather than deciding in advance which business model will prevail.

He said the success of open finance in Uzbekistan should be measured not by the number of application programming interfaces created, but by whether consumers and businesses gain access to cheaper and higher-quality financial products.

Roman Tretyakov, deputy chairman of the management board for IT and digital transformation at Octobank, said the bank plans to operate under a “banking as a service” model, providing partners with access to its services and application programming interfaces.

He acknowledged that sharing data with partners remains challenging because of personal data protection and security requirements. The bank is working with the Central Bank to make open-data exchange secure, he said.

Ahmet Kayhan, group director for payments and digital assets at VEON, said the telecommunications group serves more than 220 million customers in five countries, including Uzbekistan. He said VEON already provides financial services through its telecommunications infrastructure in areas where banks often find it unprofitable to serve remote or lower-income customers.

According to Kayhan, embedded finance is already developing around this infrastructure through retail outlets and entrepreneurs that effectively perform the functions of mini-banks.

Madhusudhanan R., co-founder of M2P Fintech, said that when choosing between building their own infrastructure and purchasing ready-made solutions, banks generally focus on two factors: transparent, customer-consent-based data management and contribution to financial inclusion.

Comparing regulatory approaches in different regions, he said strict regulation in Europe constrains innovation, while regulators in some Asian countries establish principles that allow private companies to build solutions on top of open public infrastructure.

Otabek Nasirov, chairman of the Central Asian Fintech Association, said the region does not need to adopt identical laws or build identical systems across all five countries. Instead, he proposed focusing on payment interoperability, including QR payments and faster, cheaper cross-border transfers; mutual recognition of digital identification and electronic remote identity verification; compatibility of open banking API standards; and common principles for cross-border data governance.

The goal, he said, is not to establish a single regional regulator, but to develop mutually recognized standards and compatible infrastructure capable of connecting the markets of five countries with a combined population of more than 80 million people.

Stefan Klestil, a partner at venture capital fund Speedinvest, said the fund has backed seven unicorn companies in emerging markets, including a recently announced fintech unicorn from Dubai. He said the fund primarily focuses on the quality of founding teams rather than market size.

Klestil said he sees strong technological potential in Uzbekistan as well as a significant diaspora of specialists abroad. For him, the key indicator of success would be whether the best specialists begin returning home to build businesses in Uzbekistan rather than in Silicon Valley.