Uzbekistan’s National Bank connected to CIPS directly on 9 September through the system’s operator, CIPS Co., UzDaily reported on Sunday, the first bank in the country to do so. A direct connection means settlement in yuan without a correspondent bank in between, faster payments and lower costs on foreign-trade contracts; the bank says it can become a settlement centre for other Uzbek banks.
CIPS is the People’s Bank of China’s cross-border interbank system, launched in 2015 to widen the international use of the yuan. Unlike SWIFT, which carries messages, it clears and settles; it counts more than 1,800 financial institutions from 130 countries and processed more than 180.2 trillion yuan of payments in 2025.
A book to match came with it: yuan credit lines above 11.5 billion yuan, about $1.6 billion; assets past $12 billion at the end of 2025; a loan portfolio of $9 billion, capital of $1.6 billion, net profit of $160 million.
The bond is the price tag.
In Hong Kong on 9 and 10 September the bank and China International Capital Corporation agreed a bond of $250 million equivalent in yuan and som, to be listed on the Hong Kong exchange with CICC as organiser. The agreement was reached on 9 and 10 September during Prime Minister Abdulla Aripov’s visit for the Belt and Road Forum; since 2020 the bank has placed three bonds on the London and Vienna exchanges for $1.13 billion in total.
The neighbours’ pipe was laid in Almaty on Friday. At the Central Asia Fintech Summit, Kazakhstan’s National Payment Corporation and Uzbekistan’s HUMO signed a memorandum on mutual acquiring of national QR codes: an Uzbek citizen will pay in Kazakhstan by the Kazakh national QR, a Kazakh in Uzbekistan through UzQR, with cross-border transfers between the two countries’ users to follow. Zhanar Samaeva, the corporation’s chairwoman, called it the first stage of practical development; HUMO’s chairman Aleksandr Sotnikov called it a step in regional cross-border payments.
At the summit the corporation gave its own counters: 20 million transactions and 400 billion tenge through the interbank mobile payment system since 19 July, 2 trillion tenge expected in digital tenge operations in 2026 and 2027, 127 billion tenge of fraudulent operations blocked by 1 September.
The region is laying two kinds of pipe at once, and they carry different things. A QR bridge moves the bazaar trade and the migrant’s transfer between two national systems that stay national. A CIPS line moves the China trade into a clearing house Beijing runs, in the currency Beijing issues, and a bank that clears yuan directly can lend yuan directly, and this one has 11.5 billion yuan of lines to lend from.
The bond is the price tag. A som tranche listed in Hong Kong gives foreign buyers a quoted price for Uzbek local-currency risk on a Chinese venue; a yuan tranche gives the bank the currency its CIPS connection settles.
What to watch: which Uzbek banks route their yuan through the National Bank, the bond’s tenor and coupon, and whether the Kazakh corporation’s QR link with China, which UzDaily says it plans to open by the end of 2026, reaches the Uzbek system as well.