Uzbekistan Registers Its First Mortgage Bond Issuance

Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.com) — Uzbekistan Issues First-Ever Mortgage Bonds in Capital Market Milestone Four Years in the Making

Uzbekistan has registered its first mortgage bond issuance — a 40.5 billion soum offering that marks the country's inaugural step into mortgage-backed securities and caps a multi-year effort to build the legal and financial infrastructure for capital market diversification.

The National Agency for Prospective Projects (NAPP) announced the registration of the issuance, with UMRC SPV — a special purpose vehicle established in April 2025 as a subsidiary of the Mortgage Refinancing Company (MRC) — serving as the issuer. The bonds are secured by mortgage collateral and carry a MRC guarantee.

The structure:

The issuance comprises 40.5 million bonds at a nominal value of 100 soums each, totaling 40.5 billion soums. Proceeds are earmarked exclusively for the financing and refinancing of mortgage loans, creating a direct pipeline between capital markets and the residential lending sector.

The prospectus was registered under a temporary regulatory framework governing mortgage bond circulation, adopted in November 2025 under a regulatory sandbox arrangement — a controlled environment that allows financial innovation to be tested before full statutory integration.

Why it matters:

NAPP framed the development in explicitly structural terms: mortgage bonds, the agency said, will transform illiquid mortgage assets into tradeable market instruments, establish a mechanism for attracting long-term capital, and provide sustained support for both capital market development and residential construction.

The milestone closes a chapter that opened in 2021, when Uzbekistan first began discussing mortgage bond mechanisms. The intervening years were spent building the legal framework for mortgage securitization, developing collateral standards, and engineering the refinancing infrastructure necessary to support a functioning secondary mortgage market.

The sandbox registration approach reflects a cautious but deliberate sequencing — allowing regulators to observe market behavior before committing to permanent legislative frameworks, a model increasingly common among emerging market financial reformers.

Full secondary market trading conditions and investor eligibility criteria were not disclosed in the announcement.