Planning an expansion into new regions is an exciting time for any company, bringing access to untapped markets and huge potential for growth. But it also demands careful planning and, most importantly, systems that can scale for the future.
TBC Uzbekistan is a leading digital financial ecosystem in Central Asia and part of London-listed TBC Group. Having built a dominant digitally-led banking business in Georgia, TBC entered Uzbekistan in 2019 with a digital banking business model. Uzbekistan, Central Asia’s most populous country, was identified as an attractive growth opportunity for the Group due to a number of key factors: it has a fast-growing, 38 million-strong population, youthful demographic trends and favourable macroeconomic conditions, as well as government reforms that have liberalized the economy and opened the country to international investment.
Since 2019, TBC Uzbekistan has scaled quickly to become a regional powerhouse, reaching 23 million registered users - more than 50% of Uzbekistan’s population. Its digital banking ecosystem provides a full suite of modern financial services for individual and business customers.
The company comprises high-growth fintech businesses:
TBC UZ – One of the largest digital banks in Uzbekistan and Central Asia.
Payme – A market-leading payments app.
TBC Nasiya – A fast-growing installment credit business.
TBC Insurance – fast-growing digital insurance service
BILLZ – Uzbekistan’s leading retail management SaaS platform for MSMEs
The company has been both growing organically and through highly targeted strategic M&A. In 2025, TBC Bank Group acquired a majority stake in BILLZ, Uzbekistan’s leading retail management SaaS platform. It also announced its intention to acquire OLX Uzbekistan, the country’s leading online classifieds platform, in line with the strategy to expand the ecosystem reach and services.
TBC Uzbekistan continues to scale at pace, expanding its product to provide a comprehensive suite of services to individual and business customers. Enabling further momentum meant unlocking faster execution, agility and long-term growth.
The challenge: Making space for change
As TBC Uzbekistan continues to scale rapidly and expand its customer base, it aims to enhance its software development and delivery capabilities. To achieve this, they partnered with Thoughtworks to identify key areas for improvement.
The team identified a strong opportunity to significantly accelerate time to market by streamlining and automating testing. They also saw clear potential to enhance scalability by evolving the current system architecture, making it easier to introduce new features and support future growth. In parallel, clarifying roles and responsibilities and fostering more intentional knowledge sharing across teams unlocked better collaboration and more consistent delivery outcomes.
TBC Uzbekistan was launched as a greenfield operation, requiring the team to build everything from the ground up. While this was a challenge in itself, the organization's rapid growth introduced additional complexity — scalable systems had to be developed quickly to keep up with expanding demands. This approach was essential not only for long-term success but also to strengthen the team's confidence and autonomy.
The solution: Working together as one
Right from the start, product teams from TBC Uzbekistan and Thoughtworks operated as one, with regular guild sessions and in-person meetings. This collaboration enabled both teams to quickly gain an understanding of the business and processes.
The initial assessment highlighted opportunities to streamline the company’s structure to better support growth. Together with the TBC Uzbekistan team, we established a modular and scalable foundation that enabled further progress, including the adoption of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) practices to speed up software development and deployment.
As part of the redesign, we prioritized module reusability, ensuring that the platform could be easily adapted for entry into new markets, streamlining the development process.
With the architecture changes underway, Thoughtworks focused on improving engineering effectiveness. The testing process was further automated, resulting in a dramatic increase in deployment frequency.
Modernization has made us faster and more flexible. Today, we can take code from commit to production in around 15 minutes. We have learned that distributed architecture is not about chasing a perfect blueprint, it is about making smart decisions and pragmatic trade-offs. That is why we have adopted practices that allow our architecture to evolve with the business as it grows.
As part of this effort, we also tackled the entire service creation process. Working alongside TBC Uzbekistan’s engineers, we automated the process from codebase to production path, which allowed for reduced launch times and minimized errors. More importantly, with a newly streamlined workflow, developers were able to shift their focus to building features rather than managing infrastructure.
To ensure lasting change, Thoughtworks introduced a vertical thin-slice approach. This hands-on method proved effective in shifting the development culture, enabling teams to learn by doing in a way that suited both their skills and the company's structure. Finally, once new practices were established, we documented the architecture, processes and onboarding guides to ensure scalability and smoother adoption for new team members.
The impact: Increased automation and autonomy
By the end of the collaboration, TBC Uzbekistan had significantly improved its efficiency and scalability.
Deployment frequency increased by more than 100x, enabling multiple deployments per day.
Lead time for changes was reduced by over 90%, now averaging just a few days.
Downtime dropped by 100%, eliminating service interruptions altogether.
Developer onboarding time improved by nearly 97%, shrinking to just days.
Time to market accelerated by over 80%, shifting to an on-demand mode
Other operational improvements achieved include:
payments card operations processed without a single failure.
in order times for virtual payment cards, 75% reduction for physical cards and 85.7% reduction in card blocking times.
eliminating 60,000 manual card disables
lending pre-calculations and 2x faster transfers.
Additionally, we supported TBC Uzbekistan in launching the first-of-its-kind credit card in the country, a milestone that further solidified its position as a market leader and innovator in the region.
Positioned for future growth
By evolving its technical architecture and delivery practices, TBC Uzbekistan significantly strengthened its ability to scale and innovate. These improvements not only laid the groundwork for continued user growth, but also advanced TBC Uzbekistan further growth with a scalable digital banking platform.
As Thoughtworks' first client in the region, both companies are poised to build on this success and drive further innovation together.
