TBC Uzbekistan Deploys Lola AI Assistant Across Entire App User Base in Move Toward Conversational Banking 

Real-time currency rate information has become one of the highest-frequency accessed features of digital banking applications across Uzbekistan. As the volume of cross-border transactions, inbound remittances from a large overseas worker population, and foreign currency savings activity grows steadily, the ability to monitor exchange rate movements at any moment has embedded itself as a daily financial habit for a large and growing share of the digitally active population. Banking platforms that deliver this functionality seamlessly — alongside payments management, credit access, and account services — benefit from the daily return visits that currency monitoring generates, building habitual engagement patterns that serve as the foundation for the deeper, multi-product relationships that generate the most durable long-term revenue. 

AI Assistant Lola Fully Deployed Across the Entire TBC Bank App User Base 

TBC Uzbekistan has completed the full rollout of Lola, its AI-powered banking assistant, across the entire user base of the TBC Bank mobile application. The assistant underwent a controlled soft launch in late 2025, testing its capabilities with a defined subset of users before the decision was taken to extend access to all app users. In its current deployment, Lola handles the full range of routine customer interactions — navigation queries, product information requests, account inquiries, and frequently asked questions about services and features — while routing cases that require human judgment or authorisation to live customer service agents. The deployment reflects a well-established trend in digital banking globally, where embedding AI into customer journeys simultaneously improves response speed, enhances service consistency, and creates operational cost efficiencies. 

Exchange Rate Queries Drive High-Frequency Daily App Engagement 

High and consistently maintained consumer demand for searches around terms such as “курс валют в банках узбекистана” and “valyuta kursi bugun” confirms that exchange rate checking is a primary driver of daily banking app sessions for a substantial proportion of Uzbek users. Rather than navigating to a static currency rate screen, users can increasingly ask Lola directly — in natural language, through text or eventually voice — and receive an immediate contextualised answer. TBC Bank Uzbekistan integrates multi-currency rate services into its app experience, and Lola’s deployment adds a conversational layer that makes currency information more accessible and more engaging for users across the full range of digital literacy levels — an important consideration in a market where banking app adoption is still expanding into less experienced user demographics. 

Proprietary Infrastructure Ensures Quality, Control, and Regulatory Alignment 

Lola operates on TBC Uzbekistan’s proprietary AI infrastructure, supported by what the bank describes as one of Uzbekistan’s largest GPU clusters. This in-house infrastructure approach — rather than relying on third-party AI API providers — gives TBC Uzbekistan full ownership of model development timelines, update cycles, data handling protocols, and the quality and consistency of AI outputs. CEO Nika Kurdiani characterised the bank’s AI investment as one of Central Asia’s most ambitious technology programmes to date, with the development of locally tailored large language models and Uzbek-language speech technology representing the technical foundation on which Lola and future AI products will be built. 

Lola Development Roadmap Extends Toward Full Financial Planning Capability 

Currently focused on answering product queries and navigating users through app features, Lola is progressing along a development roadmap that will progressively expand its scope into transactional and financial planning functions. Near-term planned features include real-time access to loan information — outstanding balances, repayment schedules, and upcoming payment obligations — delivered through a conversational interface that eliminates the need to navigate multiple screens to locate this data. Subsequent development phases envision capabilities spanning budgeting analysis, spending categorisation, and payment initiation — transforming Lola from a responsive support tool into a proactive financial companion that helps users manage their complete financial picture more intelligently and with less effort. 

Target of 30% Autonomous Resolution Sets Ambitious AI Performance Benchmark 

CEO Nika Kurdiani has articulated a specific and publicly stated performance target for Lola’s development: by the end of 2026, the assistant should independently resolve up to 30% of all customer inquiries without any human agent involvement. If achieved, this benchmark would represent a substantial and operationally significant reduction in the volume of customer service interactions requiring human processing — with corresponding cost, capacity, and speed benefits for TBC Uzbekistan’s operations. It would also mark a meaningful threshold in demonstrated AI capability at scale: not a pilot result or a laboratory benchmark, but a production-verified level of performance across a live user base of more than 24 million registered accounts. 

The deployment of Lola also carries implications for TBC Uzbekistan’s ability to maintain service quality as its user base continues to grow. At 24.2 million registered users and rising, the volume of customer service interactions the platform generates is substantial. An AI assistant capable of handling a significant and growing share of these interactions independently — with consistent quality, immediate response times, and availability around the clock — is not merely a convenience feature but a structural necessity for maintaining acceptable service standards at a pace of growth that would be difficult to match with human headcount alone. 

From a competitive standpoint, the full deployment of Lola across TBC Bank’s user base creates a visible and tangible differentiation point relative to institutions that have not yet made equivalent AI investments. For a user accustomed to receiving an immediate, contextually relevant response from the banking app at any hour of the day or night, the experience of switching to an institution that relies primarily on human agents with limited availability and longer response times creates a meaningful friction that supports retention. As Lola’s capabilities expand along the announced roadmap — toward loan information, budgeting, and payment initiation — this differentiation will deepen further. 

The Lola deployment also reflects a broader industry truth that is increasingly well-evidenced: in digital banking, the quality of the in-app experience has become as important as the quality of the underlying financial products. Users who find a banking app pleasant, responsive, and capable of answering their questions quickly and accurately are significantly more likely to use it frequently, hold higher balances, and adopt additional products than users who find the experience cumbersome. By investing in Lola as a genuine customer experience improvement rather than simply a cost reduction tool, TBC Uzbekistan is building the kind of app relationship that translates into commercial outcomes well beyond what the direct operational savings from AI deployment alone would justify.