Technology is easy; trust, talent and rules decide leapfrogs

Opening the second day, the Innovation Day, H.E. Nodirbek Saydullayev, First Deputy Chairman of the Central Bank of the Republic of Uzbekistan, set out a clear mandate: to establish Uzbekistan as a FinTech hub that creates financial products at home and then expands into regional and global markets. Recognising that technology's value is measured in outcomes, such as faster, more convenient and more accessible financial services, Uzbekistan's national FinTech strategy focuses on innovation by expanding regulatory sandbox, targeted innovation-support mechanisms, and modern payment rails underpinning open finance. Talent, however, will be the decisive factor to achieve the country’s goals and Uzbekistan has committed to training 5,000 young FinTech specialists by 2030, anchoring a hub built to compete regionally and globally. As AI adoption accelerates, the central bank will treat security and innovation as complementary functions to progress together, not in tension, and is committed to open dialogue, responsible technology use and deeper international cooperation on shared rails.

Dr. Patrick Njoroge, former Governor of the Central Bank of Kenya noted that networks leapfrog nations only when digital public infrastructure is built first. He set out four critical pillars: verifiable digital identity, low-cost real-time interoperable payments, consent mechanism with guardrails, and consent-based data exchange. An example is Kenya's mobile government-securities platform, which took five years to build and gave ordinary citizens a paperless, secure savings channel. Encouraging countries to adopt global benchmarks rather than reinvent the wheel, he laid out three tests that should frame frontier technology: people-centric design, technical resilience, and public-private cooperation. He also warned about risks, such as financial-stability, fraud, and illicit-flow risks with stablecoins, conflicting US and EU rules with potential spill over into other jurisdictions, and capital-expenditure bubbles, hallucination, bias, privacy harms, and concentrated power linked to AI. The solutions will require global coordination on conflicting rules and urgent AI governance.

A Central Bank official from China argued that on-chain value could inflate real economic use, citing a monitoring scan of 16 public chains which found that genuine payment activity accounted for only 1% of roughly US$60 trillion in on-chain transfers last year. A Central Bank official from Uzbekistan countered citing Uzbekistan’s own strong remittance record, delivering US$9.3 billion in first-half remittances with over half going straight to bank cards. Panellists agreed that the right model depends on context, jurisdictions with capital controls favoured central bank digital currencies while liquid markets favoured private stablecoins. When asked for a wish list to conclude the session, central bankers asked for better data and reserve transparency from private sector while those in the industry called for anchoring innovation within a real problem, to be solved jointly with regulators.

Dr. Veerathai Santiprabhob, former Governor of the Bank of Thailand, argued that digital financial transformation is not a technology project, since technology is often the easiest part to obtain. He judges public infrastructure against five dimensions: productivity, inclusivity, immunity, adaptability and integrity. By that standard Thailand's 2016 system fell short, recording only 60 electronic payments per person a year, while collateral-based lending shut households and SMEs out of formal credit and migrant workers paid close to 10% to send money home. The central bank, government, banking industry and FinTech community responded together with PromptPay, an instant payment system with no transaction fee, a national QR code standard, open payment standards, digital ID and a new Payment Systems Act. Electronic payments passed 650 per person a year and mobile banking grew more than 25 times. He set out four lessons: mindset change across every stakeholder, guiding principles agreed early, incentives that keep competition alive, and proper governance.

The session began with a case study about a young Samarkand entrepreneur, whose loan-application is rejected by a bank's AI without a clear reason. This provided the anchoring question for the panel - whether banks, regulators and countries can trust the systems that drive AI decisions and which part of the stack spanning customer data, external models, offshore cloud and supplier contracts is most critical. Views split on which layer needs first attention when the goal is real operational trust. Some panellists flagged the importance of data, as errors there pass into every layer above. Banks must own data, decision logs and governance even when models or cloud sit elsewhere. A central bank official flagged lack of control as the core risk, along with the risk of black-box credit models. The panel agreed that lenders cannot outsource responsibility for AI-driven outcomes and urged starting from shared principles and policy, built in parallel so rigid rules do not freeze progress. The panel concluded with the need for customer data, evidence trails and exit options to stay onshore, prior to scaling AI-driven credit decisions.

Digital payment adoption in Uzbekistan surged from 39% in 2021 to 72% in 2025. Cybercrime cases, however, also rose from 4,800 to over 62,000 in five years. Total admitted losses have also surged, with more than half recorded in 2025 alone. A payment rail provider noted that globally the weakest link in this chain remains the human with social engineering, deepfakes and phishing now taking only minutes. A commercial bank chief said first-time users lack basic security and data-protection knowledge, shifting disproportionate responsibility onto commercial banks that must catch client mistakes inside their own systems. Uzbekistan’s Central Bank is shifting from compliance-based rules to risk-based supervision of cyber threats. It plans to launch a cybersecurity framework with four maturity levels for banks next year. The panellists agreed that real-time collaboration is the single capability the sector must build within the next twelve months.

The panel explored what open finance truly depends on – rules, rails or capital. A FinTech executive held that rules must come first, since without regulation, rails and capital cannot move while a FinTech founder held that infrastructure needs to exist before rules can meaningfully take shape. An Industry Association executive argued that Central Asia's five markets need shared rails and mutually recognised standards more than identical laws. A Central Bank official however, rejected the binary: capital, rules and infrastructure only create real value when they operate together, with interoperability as the true underlying constraint. Uzbekistan's national FinTech strategy for 2026-2030 centres on a payment switch, cloud infrastructure and consent-based open banking, with rules designed to let business models compete safely. Panellists called for a layered model where connectivity comes first, enabling embedded finance and eventually open finance on top. A banking executive observed that data sharing still raises real security and consent concerns. The panel highlighted that investable markets start with ambitious founders and returning diaspora, not dominant local incumbents alone and agreed that AI, cybersecurity and new business models will dominate the next year of growth in the region.

Last-mile micro-enterprises often lack collateral and credit histories, leaving traditional banks reluctant to lend. Most panellists held that embedded rails have moved the needle on both breadth and depth of access. A digital bank embedded within a marketplace is already using live merchant turnover data to price loans for more than 10,000 sellers. A leading payments platform, with over 24 million registered clients and 80,000 businesses is extending services into remote areas. A FinTech Founder highlighted how open finance enabled 500,000 new accounts to be opened within six months through everyday apps in the Philippines. A Financial Services executive noted that alternative data can establish creditworthiness where conventional assets cannot. A Central Bank official however, framed the most challenging question, asking the room to look beyond access: embedded finance is expanding reach, but usage, quality and transparency continue to lag. The regulator also flagged low formal savings and called for more accessible savings products. In a blue-ocean market, incentives and open data will determine whether capital truly reaches the hardest-to-serve communities.

The final panel of the day stress-tested Uzbekistan's goal of training 5,000 FinTech specialists by 2030. A Central Bank official identified training as the single greatest constraint in meeting this ambition, ahead of both the funding for this training and ensuring retention of the trained individuals. The official stressed applied skill, not classroom STEM alone, as the real gap that firms face. A FinTech executive countered that retention is what makes any training investment pay off, while an academic and research leader warned that FinTech talent is portable and leaves without clear career paths. The head of the Presidential Human Capital Foundation refused any split of the pipeline. Forecasting, training and retention sit on one path, and the national target means 5,000 career jobs not certificates. The room closed with a live call for at least six mentors to guide young Uzbek talent for a year and return to the stage next year to show what sustained guidance can produce.

The dialogue examined how Central Asia's globalising diaspora is reshaping remittance flows and what infrastructure, regulation and market design new corridors need to be sustainable. Discussants agreed that Russia still dominates inflows, but disagreed on how quickly diversification can cut this concentration risk. Likewise, there was broad agreement that regulatory and market-structure barriers, not technology, are the main constraint to building new corridors. Russia still supplies most of Uzbekistan's remittances, so corridor concentration remains a structural vulnerability, despite growing diversification in the wake of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Building lasting corridors requires not just the adoption of new technologies, but mutual recognition and alignment of KYC, AML, and messaging standards across jurisdictions, regulatory cooperation, and compliant industry-led partnerships.

The dialogue was convened to discuss how to reconcile the widening gap between the fast-changing competencies required in fintech and the slow pace of earning university degrees, and the role of new approaches – such as skills passports, stronger industry-academia feedback loops, and the development of industry-led credentials – in closing this gap. While participants broadly agreed on the value of formal education in providing a baseline set of skills, they disagreed on the roles of private actors, academia, and the state in co-owning the development of industry-specific skills passports. Some argued that these credentials should be fully owned by the market, while others noted that regulation and academics play a key role in maintaining quality. Cultivating a more diverse set of talent pipelines, from university-led technical paths to industry apprenticeships and short reskilling courses, was seen as the most practical path forward for training young people in the skills needed for tomorrow's jobs.

The dialogue was convened to discuss how to capture the benefits of autonomous AI within regulated financial markets while preserving responsibility, control and trust clear, particularly as identity becomes increasingly more difficult to verify. Participants broadly agreed that accountability and liability must stay with human principals, and that clear guardrails will play a key role in enabling long-term adoption and scale for agentic systems. Participants agreed that every agent must have a human owner (the principal) who remains responsible regardless of the technology used, with clear decision boundaries, comprehensively defined mandates, and technical logs so accountability ultimately resides with the principal. When an agent makes a mistake, graded stop mechanisms, attributability, auditability, reversibility, and accountability are crucial to maintaining trust in digital financial markets.