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Mobile exclusive bank of Uzbekistan, TBC Bank Uzbekistanhas raised $37 million in a new funding round to bolster its dominant digital presence in the Central Asian nation by developing new AI and tech products and attracting more tech-savvy customers.
It comes just five months after the bank’s new investment by London-based parent TBC Group It collected 38.5 million dollars in July. The parent company also led the latest round, which included participation from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC).
Uzbekistan has been an attractive market for digital businesses in recent years, with nearly 90% internet penetration and a young population — 60% of its total population is under 30 years oldAccording to UNICEF. However, a significant portion of the country’s banking assets remain in state-owned banks. TBC Group sees this as a growth opportunity.
Launched in 2020 under TBC Group Uzbekistan, the bank offers a mobile app that allows customers to open bank accounts and use banking services, including cash loans and deposits.
The Uzbekistan group, which is 60% owned by London’s TBC Group and 20% owned by IFC and EBRD, has recently expanded its financial footprint in the country with an in-house processing center to simplify payment transactions and shorten time to market for new customers. made offers and entered into strategic partnerships with Visa and Mastercard. Later, it introduced the Salom debit card and the Osmon credit card, and launched TBC Business, a digital banking service for small and medium-sized Uzbek enterprises.
In the past few months, TBC Uzbekistan has also started building proprietary AI solutions, including agents to handle payment reminder calls for loan customers. Those agents were involved in 42% of all recall calls in the third quarter, Hughes told TechCrunch.
Next year, TBC Uzbekistan plans to expand its AI developments by introducing service and sales bots and a dialog-based mobile service to allow customers to interact with its app using their voice instead of going through a text-based interface.
“We are going deeper into the financial lives of retail customers in Uzbekistan. So we’re evolving from vertical to vertically diverse products,” TBC Group head of international business Oliver Hughes said in an exclusive interview.
Hughes told TechCrunch that the group hired the AI experts who developed Alice, the AI assistant for Russia’s Yandex. These experts have built a special LLM in finance based on Meta’s Llama, which understands local nuances and local languages, including Uzbek, the executive said.
While Hughes didn’t disclose the exact amount of capital the group is investing specifically in AI efforts, he said “a significant portion of the money raised will go to AI projects, but the vast majority will still be in construction and scale.” its business and consumer products.
One of them will be insurance.
TBC Uzbekistan currently offers insurance through a third-party service provider, but it plans to become an insurer in the country next year. It is also planning a buy-now-pay-later solution and an SME loan product. Similarly, the mobile bank will upgrade the Salom debit card with new benefits and offers to attract more customers.
Uzbekistan has not yet been a highly competitive market for a banking institution. However, the country’s growing digital base and young population have drawn interest from foreign players. Hungry’s OTP Bank and Korea Development Bank of South Korea have already opened stores in the country. Likewise, France’s Société Générale, Caspian of Kazakhstanand Citi Bank of the USA they are searching to enter the country.
“It’s not super competitive today, but it’s certainly going to be more and more competitive as we go along over the next few years,” Hughes said.
TBC Uzbekistan, which also operates Payme and Sharia-compliant lending business Payme Nasiya, has a user base of 16.9 million users in December 2023, up from 13.2 million. It has 4.9 million monthly active users and more than $23 million in fiscal 2023, netting $27 million in the first nine months of the year. Moreover, it predicts a net profit of $75 million in 2025.
