TBC Uzbekistan Launches AI Assistant Lola on Path to 'AI Bank of the Future'
TBC Uzbekistan, the digital banking arm of London-listed TBC Bank Group, has launched an in-app AI assistant called Lola, positioning the rollout as the first concrete step in a broader push to become what it describes as an "AI bank of the future".
Lola has been embedded inside TBC Uzbekistan's mobile banking app and is being framed as a "private banker in your pocket" rather than a conventional chatbot. At launch, the assistant handles the bank's highest-volume customer queries, covering app navigation, product guidance and frequently asked questions, with seamless handover to a human specialist when a conversation moves beyond its current remit.
The bank says Lola is powered by its own proprietary AI stack, running on what it claims is one of Uzbekistan's largest GPU clusters and underpinned by locally tailored large language models and speech technology built in-house. That positioning, sovereign AI infrastructure tuned to the Uzbek language, is unusual for a Central Asian bank and reflects a deliberate decision to avoid outsourcing the customer-facing AI layer to a foreign hyperscaler or vendor LLM.
Roadmap-wise, the next phase will see Lola surface information on customers' active loans, including outstanding balances, upcoming payments and repayment schedules. Beyond that, TBC Uzbekistan is aiming for a fully fledged financial assistant capable of handling income and expense analysis, budgeting and payments directly from a conversational interface.
Nika Kurdiani, CEO of TBC Uzbekistan, said the bank is "investing heavily in our proprietary AI technology and infrastructure, embarking on one of Central Asia's most ambitious projects to date". He added: "Our work in developing locally tailored LLMs and Speech Tech underscores our position as the leading innovator across Uzbekistan's banking sector, and with the launch of Lola, we are now pioneering an AI-native customer experience. By the end of 2026, we predict that AI will be able to independently resolve up to 30% of customer enquiries, allowing us to continue our rapid growth while improving the customer experience."
The launch lands against a backdrop of rapid scale. TBC Uzbekistan's wider digital ecosystem, which includes the TBC Bank app, the Payme payments service, BNPL installment lending, TBC Sug'urta insurance and the BILLZ retail SaaS platform, reported 24.2 million registered users and 5.8 million monthly active users at the end of Q1 2026. Its flagship TBC Salom debit card crossed one million issuances inside its first year. Across the wider TBC Bank Group footprint of Georgia and Uzbekistan, monthly active digital users now stand at 7.2 million.
That scale puts TBC Uzbekistan in direct competition with the region's other digital banking heavyweights, notably Kazakhstan's Kaspi and Halyk, both of which have pushed aggressively into super-app territory. Lola gives TBC a distinct angle in that race: rather than bolting AI onto an existing service stack, the bank is signalling that its long-term customer interface will be conversational by default, with the mobile app gradually becoming a wrapper around an AI agent rather than a screen of menus.
For TBC Bank Group, the Uzbekistan operation has rapidly evolved from a greenfield digital bet into one of the most closely watched neobank stories in the region, and Lola is shaping up to be the test case for whether a mid-sized emerging-market bank can credibly build and deploy its own AI infrastructure end to end.
