Central Bank: Banks and Payment Services Can Add or Modify Transfer Purposes Between Cards at Their Discretion

Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.com) — The Central Bank of Uzbekistan has issued clarifications regarding the implementation of the feature for specifying the purpose of transfers between cards in fintech applications. The regulator provided details on a letter sent to commercial banks and payment organizations in February 2026, which instructed them to include a field for transfer purposes in P2P interfaces.

According to the letter, banks and payment services were initially required to use a 16-item table to form a list of possible transfer purposes. The letter also set 1 March 2026 as the deadline for submitting a compliance report to the Central Bank’s Payment Systems Department, including a screenshot of the implemented feature.

The introduction of this feature is intended to support the presidential decree of 10 December 2025, promoting cashless payments and reducing the shadow economy. At the same time, banks and services were allowed to submit proposals or comments on the implementation and could voluntarily implement the feature, adding or removing options from the list of purposes. Changes may depend on the internal policies of the service and the technical capabilities of the application.

The regulator emphasized that a refined mechanism for specifying purposes in P2P transfers will be presented later “in a special order” after development is complete. The initiative aims to foster competition among online platforms, expand cashless payments, and enable banks and payment services to offer new services to clients.

Earlier this week, some fintech services already introduced mandatory specification of transfer purposes between cards, while other applications have not yet implemented this requirement.

The Central Bank noted that banks and payment services can independently determine the format and scope of updates based on their application architecture, citing the “recommendations for improving mobile app functionality” and the need to correctly process transactions.