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TBC Uzbekistan has won four Euromoney Awards for Excellence, including Central Asia's Best Digital Bank. It also received awards in Uzbekistan for consumer lending and digital banking for SMEs.
Part of TBC Bank Group, the lender was recognised as Uzbekistan's Best Digital Bank, Uzbekistan's Best for Consumer Lending and Uzbekistan's Best Digital Bank for SMEs. Euromoney cited its product range across retail banking, lending, payments, buy now, pay later services, insurance, travel and ticketing, as well as business banking and software.
TBC Uzbekistan has grown rapidly since entering the market six years ago and now reports more than 6 million monthly active users. It has positioned itself as a digital financial platform for consumers and smaller companies in Uzbekistan, one of Central Asia's largest markets.
The awards reflect its push to broaden the business beyond consumer finance. Alongside its retail products, it has expanded TBC Business as a fully digital banking and lending service for micro, small and medium-sized enterprises, while BILLZ provides retailers with software for day-to-day management.
AI focus
Euromoney also highlighted the company's work in artificial intelligence. TBC Uzbekistan has developed an AI assistant called Lola, which it says will support a two-sided model connecting consumers and businesses within the same ecosystem.
Lola is based on the bank's own speech technology and Uzbek-language large language models. The tools have also been used in customer support, sales and collections, where banks increasingly rely on automation to handle routine interactions and improve response times.
Uzbekistan has become a closely watched banking market as digital adoption rises among a young population and financial services groups compete to shift more activity to mobile platforms. TBC Uzbekistan has sought to capture that shift by combining banking, payments and adjacent services in a single digital offering.
Nika Kurdiani commented on the significance of the awards in remarks released by the company.
"Since our launch in Uzbekistan in 2020, we have made great strides in our ambition to transform financial services and make them more accessible in Central Asia. We have built a market-leading retail offering, are quickly scaling our business offering, and have leveraged AI to transform the customer experience and bring it into a new era. This recognition by Euromoney serves as further testament to our work in building not only Uzbekistan's digital banking powerhouse, but also an innovative technological leader across the entire Central Asia region," said Nika Kurdiani, Chief Executive Officer of TBC Uzbekistan.
Regional push
TBC Uzbekistan is part of London-listed TBC Bank Group, which also operates in Georgia. For the group, the recognition adds weight to its strategy of using Uzbekistan as a key growth market outside its home base, with digital distribution and consumer finance at the centre of that effort.
TBC Uzbekistan says it reached profitability two years after launch, a milestone that sets it apart from many digital banking ventures that have taken longer to break even. It has since continued to add users while expanding its range of products for households and businesses.
Its consumer operations combine the TBC UZ digital bank with the Payme payments app, while its business offering is built around TBC Business and BILLZ. The structure reflects a broader industry move towards linking payments, banking and merchant tools rather than offering each service separately.
Euromoney's Awards for Excellence are widely followed in the banking sector and cover institutions in more than 125 countries and territories. The programme, which has run for more than three decades, assesses banks and financial groups on strategy, performance and market impact.
For TBC Uzbekistan, the strongest endorsement in this year's results came from the regional digital banking award, which places the lender ahead of peers across Central Asia. The additional domestic awards in retail lending and SME banking also suggest its expansion beyond a single-product model is gaining traction.
Its retail and payments brands rank among the most recognised financial names in Tashkent and hold strong positions nationwide.