Uzbekistan Commercial Banks Required to Fix Compliance Causes

Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.uz) — The Board of the Central Bank of Uzbekistan has introduced amendments and additions to the regulation establishing minimum requirements for commercial bank operations when interacting with consumers of banking services. The relevant resolution dated 15 July 2026, numbered 19/16, was registered by the Ministry of Justice on 1 August 2026 under number 3030-12 and will enter into force one month after its official publication.

The document introduces for the first time a legal definition of a "systemic defect." It is defined as a shortcoming in a specific financial product, business process, banking service branch network, information system, or internal control system, as well as in contracts, operations, service processes, or structural unit activities of similar content, which is not limited to a single case and leads to the violation of consumer rights.

Under the adopted amendment, when processing client appeals, banks are now required to eliminate not only the violations and negative situations described in the appeals themselves, but also the root causes that led to the violation of consumer rights and legitimate interests.

Banks must summarize and analyze received appeals at the end of each quarter and year. Based on this analysis, reports must be compiled reflecting general performance metrics regarding appeals, their types, quantity, and root causes, frequently raised issues, as well as the distribution of appeals by region and banking service type.

The reports must also contain analytical information on how well banking services meet consumer requirements and whether fair interaction with customers has been established, along with details regarding key identified shortcomings, violations, and measures taken to eliminate their causes.

Such quarterly reports must be published on the bank's official website by the 20th day of the month following the reporting quarter, while annual reports must be published by 15 February.

The bank's board of directors is required during its end-of-quarter and end-of-year meetings to review the status of appeal processing, including synthesis and analysis results, identified systemic defects, and characteristic risks, and to approve action plans to eliminate systemic defects leading to consumer rights violations.

These board decisions and analytical reports are passed to the internal audit service, which uses them when drafting audit plans and monitoring bank activities.

The regulation also sets out a list of circumstances under which measures to eliminate systemic defects are deemed not to have been taken.

These include, in particular, the lack of an approved action plan, non-compliance with execution deadlines set in the plan, the persistence of defects despite measures taken, and the failure of the internal audit service to submit performance task evaluations and annual evaluations of the system's effectiveness for handling appeals from citizens and legal entities within established deadlines.

A bank must submit copies of board decisions regarding appeals to the Central Bank within three business days of their approval, and information on the resolution of each systemic defect within five business days of its elimination.

In addition, information regarding the bank's work with client appeals must be reflected in the annual report approved at the general meeting of shareholders.

The regulation was supplemented with a new appendix containing a standard action plan form for eliminating systemic defects that lead to the violation of consumer rights.