Leapfroggning Legacy Finance: Fintech Infrastructure Transformation in Central Asia (Evidence from Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan)

Countries without a well-established financial infrastructure find themselves in an atypical situation: technological convergence transforms the lack of legacy systems from a structural disadvantage into a competitive advantage. Central Asia is building a new generation of financial systems from scratch, being at the intersection of competing payment architectures: e-CNY, SWIFT and emerging CBDC initiatives. A comparative analysis of two fundamentally different strategies in a single region makes a significant contribution to the global debate on decentralization and technological convergence of financial infrastructure.
The study is based on a comparative analysis of data from the central banks of both countries, the IMF and the World Bank for 2017-2025. For a structured comparison, the author's Financial Infrastructure Convergence Index has been introduced, covering the digitalization of payments, the depth of the credit market, regulatory readiness for CBDC and DeFi, cross-border integration and sustainability of financing.
Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are moving in different ways. The first one builds an institutional model through a specialized financial jurisdiction and developed capital markets. The second one demonstrates high-speed leapfrogging — the rapid formation of a retail fintech ecosystem with an institutional base still being formed. Both countries face the same structural limitation: the lack of a regulatory sandbox blocking next-generation DeFi protocols and services. The geopolitical fragmentation of global payment systems turns this barrier into a strategic issue and at the same time opens a window for the formation of an independent Central Asian payment corridor.
The study offers a roadmap for regional convergence: compatible CBDC standards, DeFi integration into the regulatory environment, a single Open Banking API, and a harmonized ESG taxonomy. The Kazakh and Uzbek models represent complementary trajectories rather than alternative ones. Their convergence forms the basis for building a new generation of regional financial infrastructure, without the structural constraints typical of mature markets.