Tajikistan's Unified QR Code System — Interoperable Digital Payments Under the National Financial Inclusion Strategy

Tajikistan has one of Central Asia's lowest baselines of financial inclusion: as recently as 2011 only about 3% of adults held any account, cash dominated daily transactions, and remittances from labour migrants — a large share of GDP — mostly moved outside the formal financial system.
Under its National Financial Inclusion Strategy, the National Bank of Tajikistan introduced a Unified QR Code System in 2022 and integrated it into the national fast-payment system in 2023, letting customers of different banks and e-wallets pay any participating merchant with one standard QR code instead of needing separate closed-loop apps per provider.
By August 2025, 25,388 unified QR codes had been deployed nationwide; in the twelve months to June 2025, 56.3 million non-cash transactions worth over US$2 billion were processed, up 34.9% in number and 51.0% in value year-on-year. The National Bank reports an 11-fold rise in customers using mobile or internet channels to access accounts and a 260% rise in customers making digital payments since the strategy began. Overall account ownership reached 55% of adults by 2025 per the World Bank's Global Findex survey, up from 3% in 2011, and 39% of adults now make digital payments.
Progress is uneven: men (63%) remain 16 percentage points more likely than women (47%) to hold an account, and rural residents depend far more on informal cross-border remittances (50.6%) than urban residents (30.8%) — so the reported transaction growth reflects a payments rail scaling faster than the underlying access gap is closing.

Read the full analysis: https://gfrid.org/publications/tajikistans-financial-inclusion-at-a-glance-global-findex-2025/