Oliver Hughes
Podcast appearances as guest
Episode 24 - Oliver Hughes
In this episode, I sit down with Oliver Hughes, Head of international business at TBC Bank Group.
On the podcast
Oliver spent almost ten years at Visa, seven as head of Visa in Russia, and was CEO of Tinkoff from 2007 to 2022.
When Oliver left, Tinkoff had 22 million customers and had made about $600 million in net profit in 2021; it now has around 40 million.
TBC Uzbekistan broke even within two years of operations; Oliver joined in 2023.
Uzbekistan has about 38 million people, a million births a year, an average age of 28, and GDP growth revised to about 6.5%.
About 70% of Uzbekistan's banking assets are held by state-owned banks, a legacy of the Soviet era; the country opened up around 2016–17.
Uzbekistan's local card systems, Humo and Uzcard, sit on an API layer that enables quasi open banking: customers can link any bank's card and share 12 months of data.
Payme had about one million customers when TBC bought it and now has 15 million registered users and 4.5 million monthly active users.
TBC built its Uzbek bank with a separate licence, tech stack and team, with EBRD and IFC as partners; the team spans 28 nationalities.
TBC in Georgia earns returns on equity of around 25% in a country of 3.7 million people.
About 50–60% of TBC Uzbekistan's payment reminders are handled by its own speech bot, and a Telegram sales bot is moving to generative AI.