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A domestic payment from Tashkent to Bukhara clears in seconds. Send the same amount to Dubai, Singapore or New York, and it crawls through several banks, several jurisdictions and a stack of compliance checks before it lands.
Moderator Iqbal Jumabhoy opened the panel discussing that asymmetry, and the numbers behind it. The real question is not whether cross-border payments can move faster, but why they haven't. It's surprising since the market is real and the need is obvious. Remittances make up roughly 15% of Uzbekistan's GDP, 17.6% of the Kyrgyz Republic's, and 46% of Tajikistan's.
Domestic rails are solved. Cross-border isn't.
Djamshid Usmanov of the Central Bank of Uzbekistan laid out why this is the case. Inside the country, payments move instantly, but an international transfer runs through multiple banks, jurisdictions, and payment infrastructures, each layering on its own AML, KYC and foreign-exchange checks. This doesn't just add costs, but delays stack up at every hop.
Ari Sarker, reflecting on 15 years at Mastercard, reduced the problem to five unresolved variables: transparency, cost, security, data and interoperability.
India solved it with three building blocks, not a new rail.
Arif Khan, who helped build India's UPI at NPCI before moving to Razorpay, traced its success to three layers stacked in sequence: 1) a national digital ID (Aadhaar, now enrolling close to a billion citizens), 2) universal bank access (a government push that took India from roughly 20% to 80% banked in seven years, against a World Bank estimate of 35), and 3) mass mobile penetration.
Together, they let UPI process 20 billion transactions a month. His advice to Uzbekistan and its neighbours isn't a new protocol, but more corridors rather than a grand unified rail.
Stablecoins won't replace correspondent banking
David Kleiman of Klearium pointed to a quieter bottleneck: roughly 3,000 to 3,500 banks worldwide have no correspondent relationship at all and can't move money for their own citizens.
Sergio Mello of Anchorage Digital argued the fix isn't choosing between old rails and new ones. Anchorage's "stablecoin correspondent banking" product lets foreign banks hold nostro accounts in stablecoins alongside fiat, and even Western Union, 160 years after inventing the wire transfer, now issues an Anchorage-backed stablecoin for faster treasury operations, without dropping a single bank partnership.
Speakers:
Ari Sarker, Former President, Asia Pacific, Mastercard
Arif Khan, Chief Innovation Officer, Razorpay
David Kleiman, Chief Executive Officer, Klearium Inc
Djamshid Usmanov, Director of the Department of Payment Systems Development, Central Bank of the Republic of Uzbekistan
Sergio Mello, Global Head of Stablecoin Solutions, Anchorage Digital
Host:
Iqbal Jumabhoy, Chief Executive Officer, Edge Capital Pte Ltd
Silk Road Finance & Technology Forum | Tashkent, Uzbekistan
