Today, people travelling around the region pay by card or in cash. If the national QR platforms of the five countries reach an agreement, then, roughly speaking, a Kazakhstani customer will be able to pay for a purchase in Tashkent by QR from their own bank’s app.
There is no launch date yet: by the end of the year, regulators are only working out the mechanism. Ideally, banks should already check whether their QR services are ready for payments from neighbouring countries.
Key points
On 22–23 October 2026, Dushanbe hosted a regional meeting of representatives from the central banks of five countries. The participants agreed to work out, by the end of the year, a mechanism for interaction between national QR payment platforms, Spot.uz reports, citing the National Bank of Kazakhstan.
The discussion involved representatives of the National Bank of Kazakhstan, the National Bank of Kyrgyzstan, the National Bank of Tajikistan, the Central Bank of Uzbekistan and the Central Bank of Azerbaijan.
Once the integration is in place, citizens of these countries will be able to pay for purchases and transfer money by QR code through their bank’s app while travelling. Specific launch dates for cross-border QR payments have not yet been announced.
At the meeting, the National Bank of Kazakhstan also presented the results of its work on digital financial infrastructure, including the digital tenge, open banking and the National Antifraud Center. Cross-border services are being developed in parallel with upgrades to local systems: Uzbekistan earlier announced the launch of a unified payment infrastructure for person-to-person transfers.
