Standardized rails threaten Uzum
Uzum
The real risk is that Uzum may lose some of the extra profit that comes from owning the full payment path, while rivals keep the customer relationship without paying for warehouses, pickup points, or a bank balance sheet. Uzum today earns multiple times on one purchase because the shopper buys on Uzum Market, finances with Nasiya, and pays over Uzum-controlled rails. If national QR and open API rules make acceptance and account access more interchangeable, Click and Payme can plug into more merchant and consumer flows with much lower fixed cost.
-
Uzum has built a closed loop that is unusually dense for Uzbekistan. More than 50% of e-commerce payments use its own fintech instruments, nearly 48% of marketplace GMV uses Nasiya, and merchants can accept Uzum QR payments and installment financing through a single code. That is powerful when checkout is proprietary, but less differentiated when standards force broader interoperability.
-
Click and Payme are dangerous precisely because they are already daily payment habits. Click has over 20M users and added a Halyk Bank partnership in July 2025 that expands banking capacity without forcing it to build Uzum-like commerce infrastructure. TBC Uzbekistan said its ecosystem reached 22M unique registered users in 9M 2025, with Payme as one of the core apps.
-
The policy direction is moving toward common rails. Uzbekistan's Central Bank said it planned a universal QR standard so any banking or payment app could scan one merchant code, and later moved toward a mandatory national payment switch with OpenAPI based P2P access. That shifts advantage from owning exclusive acceptance points to winning on app frequency, underwriting, and distribution.
From here, the battleground shifts from who owns the checkout button to who turns payment traffic into higher value products fastest. Uzum still has the strongest commerce linked lending loop, but Click and Payme are positioned to capture more of the payment surface as rails standardize. That will push Uzum to lean harder on underwriting, merchant software, and bundled commerce services that remain difficult to copy.