Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.uz) — Banking and payment industry representatives discussed the use of artificial intelligence in financial services, QR payment costs and the integration of national payment systems for cross-border transactions at the FINOBOD forum in Tashkent.
The topics were covered during a session titled “Banks and Payment Platforms”.
Anna Savina, president of the Right Outdoor Media group of companies and the session moderator, cited Central Bank figures showing that Uzbekistan received US$15.9 billion in international payments during the first nine months of 2026. Outgoing payments totalled US$2 billion.
Roman Tretyakov, deputy chairman of the management board of Octobank, said AI agents capable of making payments independently were already being used abroad.
He cited Stripe as an example of a payment system that allows an agent to select tickets, book a hotel and complete payment on behalf of a customer. According to Tretyakov, Visa and Mastercard are lagging in this area because of their extensive internal regulations.
Octobank is developing a “banking-as-a-service” model under which partners connect to its platform and build their own products. Key functions, including anti-money laundering (AML), fraud prevention and interaction with government systems, remain within the bank.
Sergey Kozlov, adviser to the chairman of the management board and chief AI officer at Uzpromstroybank, said artificial intelligence remained a tool for scaling the bank’s operations rather than an end in itself.
He said the bank uses a unified platform called Nova and reuses shared components across different services. These include speech recognition, which is used in the call centre, debt collection, branches and quality control, as well as image and document processing.
Kozlov said the bank could delegate functions to external solutions but could not delegate responsibility for decision-making.
He added that lending decisions had to be explainable and that the impact of new scoring models should be assessed through A/B testing. Rather than simply rejecting an applicant, banks should offer alternatives such as flexible repayment schedules or loans disbursed in instalments.
For seasonal businesses, including restaurants, repayment schedules could be adjusted to reflect fluctuations in revenue, with higher payments during peak seasons and lower payments during quieter periods, he said.
Naima Mirzayeva, a member of Click’s supervisory board, said the platform had 24 million users. Click uses AI to personalise its services and is developing an AI assistant that already has more than 60,000 users.
At the same time, fraud schemes are becoming more sophisticated, she said. The platform informs customers about potential risks and continues to improve its fraud prevention systems. Click is also certified under the PCI DSS 4.0 Level 1 standard.
Islam Diyarov, director of HUMO’s acquiring and issuing department, said the company had integrated with Apple Pay and India’s UPI payment system and was working on a project with Kazakhstan.
He identified the alignment of know-your-customer (KYC) and AML requirements, as well as standards for exchanging customer data, as the main challenges in cross-border integration. Responsibility for verifying merchants and customers, however, remains at the national level, he said.
Diyarov also said QR payments in Uzbekistan were approximately five times more expensive than POS acquiring, whereas the opposite was generally the case internationally. The final merchant fee is calculated through a series of charges imposed by the payment system, the issuing bank and the acquiring bank.
Tretyakov added that seven Uzbek banks had launched Apple Pay around a month earlier, but this had not reduced the popularity of QR payments.
He also cited figures showing that USD stablecoin turnover had increased 1.5 times over the previous year.
Yekaterina Zemskova, chief operating officer and director of digital assets at PAY10, said the company held central bank licences in the UAE, Bahrain, India, Morocco and Hungary.
She said national QR payment systems could be connected through application programming interfaces (APIs), allowing travellers to use familiar payment services abroad.
In her view, stablecoins were needed not by end customers but by the wider financial ecosystem. They could make cross-border transfers faster and cheaper in jurisdictions where regulations permit their use.
Zemskova said regulation was developing rapidly in the UAE, while Morocco did not yet have a regulatory framework in this area.
