Five markets, no payment area
Post-Soviet Central Asia is made up of five independent states: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. That means five currencies, five central banks, and five separate national switches. No regional scheme connects them, no common legal framework brings them together, and no cross-border interoperability project like Southeast Asia's QR links is live there. The “Central Asian market” is therefore not a single payment area. Each of the five countries is an acceptance market in its own right.
The five markets have followed similar paths, however. Each started as a cash economy, each built a domestic card rail to pay public sector salaries, and in each the central bank is now reasserting control over private players that have become dominant. Most of the major decisions described in this guide date from 2024 to 2026. Any account of the region from before that period misses both the acceptance requirements that took effect in July 2026 and the cap on QR fees in Uzbekistan.
| Country | Currency | Central bank | Operator / switch | Domestic card scheme | Retail instant rail |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kazakhstan | Tenge (KZT) | National Bank of Kazakhstan | National Payment Corporation, formerly the Kazakhstan Interbank Settlement Centre | No interbank scheme; the National Bank lists the local Kaspi.kz system alongside Visa and Mastercard | IPS (2022), then IMPS, launched nationwide on July 19, 2026 |
| Uzbekistan | Soum (UZS) | Central Bank of the Republic of Uzbekistan | Common Republican Processing Centre (Uzcard) and National Interbank Processing Centre (Humo) | Uzcard and Humo (2018) | The central bank's instant payment system; UzQR for merchant QR payments |
| Kyrgyzstan | Som (KGS) | National Bank of the Kyrgyz Republic | Interbank Processing Center (IPC) | Elcart | ELQR (2022) |
| Tajikistan | Somoni (TJS) | National Bank of Tajikistan | National Bank of Tajikistan | Korti Milli (2017) | No public interbank instant payment rail identified |
| Turkmenistan | Manat (TMT) | Central Bank of Turkmenistan | Central Bank of Turkmenistan | Altyn Asyr (2001) | No public interbank instant payment rail identified |
Kaspi.kz: when a private company becomes the infrastructure
Kaspi.kz JSC is a Kazakh joint-stock company listed on Nasdaq. It runs two apps: the Kaspi Super App for consumers and the Kaspi Pay Super App for merchants. Payments, a marketplace, consumer credit, government services, and ticketing all sit in the same user journey. That setup is still rare worldwide: the private platform took over retail payments before the equivalent public infrastructure existed.
The two shares published by the National Bank differ: Kaspi handles 83% of transactions by number but about 75% by value. A gap in that direction means a lower average ticket than the rest of the market, so Kaspi's dominance rests mainly on small everyday payments. Business payments and large-value payments partly escape it and are still handled by traditional banks.
- Kaspi's QR code is proprietary. Until the interbank QR arrived, a merchant using Kaspi could only accept payments from Kaspi customers, and vice versa.
- Acceptance runs through the merchant app, not a conventional terminal. A smartphone is enough, which let Kaspi sign up businesses that traditional acquiring never reached.
- Credit is built into checkout: installment payments and consumer credit appear on the same screen as paying in full.
- The dependence runs both ways: a Kazakh online merchant without Kaspi misses out on most shoppers, and an online merchant that relies on Kaspi alone has no leverage to negotiate pricing.
Kazakhstan's public response: IPS, interbank QR, and IMPS
The National Payment Corporation is the subsidiary of the National Bank of Kazakhstan that runs the public payment rails. It grew out of the Kazakhstan Interbank Settlement Centre. Among other systems, it operates the IPS (Instant Payments System), which introduced transfers by phone number and QR payments in 2022. Rollout remains partial, since some banks are not connected. A unified interbank QR system entered its pilot phase in 2025 with Bank CenterCredit, Freedom Bank, and Home Credit Bank.
The IMPS (Interbank Mobile Payment System) is Kazakhstan's retail instant payment rail, launched nationwide on July 19, 2026. It extends to every bank what IPS and the unified QR had opened to only some of them. Instant transfers by phone number and interoperable QR payments run on it 24 hours a day. More than KZT 160 billion in payments and transfers, or about $339 million, had gone through the system before its general launch (National Bank of Kazakhstan, July 2026). India's IMPS, run by NPCI, has the same acronym but is unrelated.
Since July 19, 2026, merchants in Kazakhstan have been required to accept both cards and electronic payments. The requirement means having a terminal and working with an acquiring bank (Oninvest, July 2026). Accepting payments only through a single bank's QR code does not cover card acceptance, so it is no longer compliant.
Uzbekistan: Uzcard, Humo, and the end of a closed duopoly
Uzbekistan is the most populous market in the region, and the only one with two competing domestic card schemes. Uzcard, operated by Common Republican Processing Centre LLC, is the country's original network. The central bank created Humo in 2018 after a software failure at what was then the only processing center in operation. The goal was as much to remove a single point of failure as to end a monopoly.
Humo's creation produced two walled-off networks rather than an interoperable system: until 2023, an Uzcard cardholder could not withdraw cash at a Humo ATM. The split lasted five years. The two ATM networks were integrated under regulatory pressure, and the integration covers ATM withdrawals only. Merchant acquiring coverage therefore has to be checked network by network, with the acquirer.
| Uzcard | Humo | |
|---|---|---|
| Operator | Common Republican Processing Centre LLC | National Interbank Processing Centre LLC |
| Founded | The country's original network | 2018, set up by the central bank |
| Ownership | Private | The state's stake was sold to Paynet for $65 million in January 2025 (Gazeta.uz) |
| Reported card base | Largest network by number of cards | Over 27 million cards, over 210,000 terminals, over 6,400 ATMs (Humo, 2025) |
| ATM interoperability | Cross-acceptance in place since 2023 | Cross-acceptance in place since 2023 |
| Watch out for | Older network, broadest merchant coverage | Announced a government bond-backed token in July 2025; worth watching, but not seen in production |
Accepting payments in Uzbekistan: Payme, Click, Uzum, and the unified QR
Online acceptance in Uzbekistan runs not through the international schemes but through three domestic platforms. Click led the way in 2011 with USSD mobile payments. Payme, operated by LLC Inspired, joined Georgia's TBC Bank group in April 2019, when TBC took a 51% stake at a valuation of $10.8 million. TBC bought the remaining 49% in May 2023 for $55.7 million, valuing the company at $113.6 million (Gazeta.uz, 2023). Uzum Bank, formerly Apelsin, rounds out the trio by tying payments to a marketplace.
The market is highly concentrated. Click and Payme together handle 85% of the country's online payments (KPMG Uzbekistan, 2024). An integration limited to Visa and Mastercard therefore reaches only a small fraction of Uzbek shoppers, whose cards run on the domestic networks.
| Platform | Ownership | What it adds | What to watch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Payme | TBC Bank Group PLC (Georgia), through LLC Inspired | Young user base, polished user experience, documented API | Depends on a listed foreign group, exposed to governance changes |
| Click | Independent Uzbek company, active since 2011 | First-mover advantage, biller network, REST API | USSD legacy still visible in some integrations |
| Uzum Bank | Uzum group, licensed bank (formerly Apelsin) | Payments tied to a marketplace and built-in credit | 7.0 million cards issued as of July 1, 2026: the customer base is real, merchant coverage less mature |
- The 0.65% rate is a market-wide cap, not an opening bid. Any higher quote on QR volume has to be justified line by line.
- The July 1, 2026 requirement covers physical stores and service businesses. It affects how in-store acceptance is sized, not online acceptance.
- The central bank is building a national switch that will route payment system operators, including e-money issuers, through its own gateway.
- The soum is not an international settlement currency. Repatriation is negotiated separately from the acceptance contract, and it often costs more than the acquiring fee.
Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan: three markets playing catch-up
Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan each have a domestic card scheme under the authority of their central bank: Elcart, Korti Milli, and Altyn Asyr. All three were created to meet a government need: paying public salaries, pensions, and social benefits without cash. Merchant acceptance came later. That sequence explains where cards are accepted: widely in the capitals, sparsely elsewhere.
Kyrgyzstan also has Elsom, a mobile wallet from KICB (Kyrgyz Investment and Credit Bank), distributed through an agent network and designed for unbanked rural areas. The model is common in economies with dispersed populations, where a physical agent remains the link between cash and an account. A merchant QR code handles the payment itself but not the conversion from banknotes to a balance. The two systems therefore coexist rather than replace each other.
- Zero cross-border acceptance among the three countries: an Elcart card does not work in Tajikistan, and a Korti Milli card does not work in Kyrgyzstan. Each market needs its own integration.
- Domestic cards do not consistently support an authentication program comparable to 3-D Secure. Card-not-present fraud is handled contractually with the local acquirer, not through scheme rules.
- Migrant remittances were equal to about 45% of Tajikistan's GDP in 2024 (World Bank). Retail payments there are structurally the downstream end of a remittance corridor.
- In Turkmenistan, every acceptance contract needs an explicit repatriation clause. Convertibility, not technology, is the binding constraint.
The Russia corridor: remittances, Mir, and secondary sanctions
The Russia corridor covers all payment flows between Russia and the five republics, and remittances dominate it. Russia is still the top destination for Central Asian migrant workers, and therefore the top source of foreign currency inflows. The corridor is large and concentrated: a handful of money transfer operators handle most of the flows. Since 2024, it has also become the main source of legal risk for every bank in the region, because of US and EU sanctions on Russian infrastructure.
Dependence on Russia is declining, slowly. Russia's share of remittances to Uzbekistan fell five percentage points in a year, with Kazakhstan, South Korea, and Europe gaining. The shift reflects migrants moving to a wider range of destinations, which remittance data track directly. It has not yet changed the scale of the corridor: Russia still accounted for 72.4% of the amounts received in the first quarter of 2026.
The corridor is shrinking through operational channels as much as through the law. In Kyrgyzstan, the Interbank Processing Center's Latvian software supplier threatened to cut it off, and that threat alone was enough to end Mir acceptance in the country. A payment chain depends on its software vendors and processors as much as on its banks, and each of them has its own sanctions exposure.
De-dollarization and the digital tenge: currency as payment policy
De-dollarization means reducing the share of foreign currency in a banking system's deposits and loans in favor of the national currency. It is measured on bank balance sheets, and it determines what a merchant can invoice, collect, and repatriate. Uzbekistan publishes the most explicit trajectory in the region.
Timur Ishmetov, the central bank's governor, describes these moves as structural shifts rather than technical adjustments. A lasting decline in dollarization deepens the soum market and lowers the cost of currency hedging. Invoicing in local currency then becomes viable for merchants who would not have considered it five years earlier. The constraint shifts to repatriation, which is negotiated outside the acceptance contract.
The digital tenge is Kazakhstan's central bank digital currency, issued by the National Bank. Its purpose is to make public spending traceable: public procurement, management of National Fund assets, tax administration, subsidies, and infrastructure financing. Retail payments are not among its use cases, which sets the Kazakh project apart from most central bank digital currencies. On July 18, 2026, the digital tenge became a recognized form of the national currency, and the National Bank of Kazakhstan received the exclusive right to issue it and manage its circulation.
| Instrument | Country | Goal | What practitioners need to know |
|---|---|---|---|
| Digital tenge | Kazakhstan | Traceable public spending and public procurement | Legal status since July 18, 2026; not a retail payment method to add at checkout |
| Interbank QR / IMPS | Kazakhstan | Break up private concentration in retail payments | Nationwide launch on July 19, 2026; merchants must accept cards and electronic payments |
| UzQR | Uzbekistan | Unify fragmented QR codes and cap the cost of acceptance | 0.65% merchant fee; acceptance mandatory since July 1, 2026 |
| De-dollarization | Uzbekistan | Reduce the share of foreign currency on bank balance sheets | Deposit dollarization down from 41.2% to 20% since 2018: invoicing in soums becomes realistic |
Operating in the region: what breaks and what it costs
Launching acceptance in Central Asia means five separate projects, one per country. Nothing can be pooled: not the five integrations, the five acquiring contracts, the five foreign exchange regimes, or the five sets of compliance checks. The region has neither a common scheme nor a common legal framework. The only thing the five share is the sanctions risk tied to the Russia corridor, and that is managed at group level.
| Market | Online acceptance | In-store acceptance | Most common pitfall |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kazakhstan | Kaspi is a must, alongside standard card acquiring | A terminal and an acquiring bank are now mandatory, plus the interbank QR | Treating Kaspi as just another local payment method, without a dedicated contract, reporting, or settlement cycle |
| Uzbekistan | Payme and Click first, Uzum depending on the target market | Uzcard and Humo through the acquirer, plus UzQR, mandatory since July 1, 2026 | Integrating only Visa and Mastercard: actual market coverage is marginal |
| Kyrgyzstan | Local acquiring; Elcart cardholder base | Elcart and the interoperable ELQR code | Assuming that Kazakh acceptance covers the country |
| Tajikistan | Alif Mobi and local acquiring | Korti Milli, dominant outside the major cities | Underestimating cash and the remittance corridor that feeds payments |
| Turkmenistan | Limited options, to be assessed case by case | Altyn Asyr | Neglecting the repatriation clause: manat convertibility is the binding constraint |
- Name the acquirer, not the country. Policies on sanctions, Mir acceptance, and correspondent banking vary from one bank to the next within the same market. Due diligence has to be done institution by institution.
- Secure network coverage in the contract. In Uzbekistan, Uzcard acceptance and Humo acceptance are contracted separately. ATM interoperability does not mean merchant acquiring interoperability.
- Ask for an itemized breakdown of QR fees. Uzbekistan's 0.65% cap is public, so any difference has to be explained by a specific service, not by a blended rate card.
- Map your software vendors and processors. A software supplier exposed to sanctions can take down a national switch, as happened in Kyrgyzstan in 2024.
- Separate acceptance from repatriation. Foreign exchange costs and the time it takes to move currency out of the country often exceed the acquiring fee, especially in Turkmenistan and Tajikistan.
- Check the dates on your sources. Most of the regulation cited here is less than 18 months old. Any overview published before 2025 describes a market that no longer exists.
Central banks across the region are taking back control of retail payments: through interoperable QR codes in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and through national cards in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. The dominant private players are still there, but they no longer have exclusive control of the rail that transactions run on. As a result, the key decision in accepting payments has shifted. It now turns on which acquiring bank carries the volume and at what cost, more than on which app the customer uses.