Uzbekistan, long a low-margin market, is starting to get more expensive to process

Uzbekistan has long been one of those CIS geos PSPs kept in the portfolio because they had to, not because the margin was thrilling. That looks like it is changing: two legal bookmakers are now operating, P2P traders are seeing more wallet and bank account blocks, and processing prices are starting to move up.

1. Two legal bookmakers have officially launched in Uzbekistan: Olimpbet and Oltinbet. For payments people, that matters because legal betting usually changes the shape of local traffic, merchant demand, and the risk conversation around the market.
2. At the same time, P2P traders are facing more frequent blocks on wallets and bank accounts. The immediate effect described in the source is straightforward: traders are raising their fees because the material no longer pays for itself at the old rates, and the risk has to be priced in somewhere.
3. That cost pressure is already showing up on the PSP side. Payment systems are beginning to raise their processing prices, and if your partners have not sent a new price list yet, the source argues that it is only a matter of time.
4. The pattern now looks familiar to anyone who has watched Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan move from “manageable” to more difficult processing geos. The sequence described is: controlled issuance for payouts, then old-fashioned transgrans, then the sort of non-trivial workarounds the industry usually arrives at by trial and error.

For high-risk operators and PSPs, the practical takeaway is not that Uzbekistan has suddenly become unworkable. It is that a market long treated as low-margin is starting to behave like one with a rising risk price, which usually means pricing, routing, and partner appetite all need a fresh look.