When Commerzbank opened its Tashkent office in 1998, Uzbekistan's economy stood at roughly $13bn. Last year it reached $145bn, having more than doubled from $60bn just nine years earlier.

The scale of that transformation is symptomatic of the Former Soviet Union (FSU) catch-up growth seen as newly minted economies go from socialist centrally planned economies to liberal market-based systems. It has been a long and painful process but after three decades even Central Asia has arrived at the critical mass point and can look forward to decades of rapid development.

"As of today, all our reporting balance sheet statements are confirmed by international audit and consulting companies," said Sadobek Usmonbekov, first deputy chairman of the National Bank of Uzbekistan (NBU), describing a transformation that has seen the bank's average international credit limit rise from roughly $100mn seven or eight years ago to several times that figure today, as detailed at last week's Tashkent International Investment Forum (TIIF) in June.

Uzbekistan's sovereign credit rating improved to BBB- last year, and the country issued a $1bn sovereign bond denominated in local currency — the Uzbekistani som (UZS) — at a rate of 12.25%, a sign, Usmonbekov said, of genuine international appetite for exposure to the national currency itself, not merely dollar-denominated risk.

What ECAs actually do

Export credit agencies — government-backed institutions whose primary purpose is promoting their home country's trade — have been quietly financing Uzbekistan's transformation for decades. Germany's Euler Hermes closed its first transaction in the country in 2001 and has since made credit decisions worth €2.7bn, with its medium- and long-term portfolio growing from roughly €180mn to over €300mn annually.

Thomas Baum, head of underwriting at Euler Hermes, explained the appeal directly to TIIF delegates: the agency carries no formal country exposure limit, can offer loan tenors of up to 18 years following a 2023 OECD reform, and provides the kind of collateral that allows commercial banks to lend competitively in euros and dollars where local currency financing alone would not suffice.

France's BPI France, represented by deputy head Pavlo Stelgaard, offers a complementary structure: in addition to classical tied buyer credit, the agency has developed a "shopping line" — a flexible credit facility of up to €200mn that a borrower can draw down across multiple projects over 24 months, provided French content reaches 20 to 30%. "We see ourselves as really the right hands for your development," Stelgaard said, framing the instrument explicitly as a tool of economic diplomacy as much as finance.

MIGA: The multilateral complement

Where export credit agencies are constrained by the national-content requirements that justify their existence to taxpayers back home, the World Bank Group's Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency operates on a different logic.

"MIGA can offer our guarantee to some of the state enterprise and state-owned banks without the sovereign guarantee," said Jiyoung Jin, who covers Central Asia for the agency.

MIGA's most significant Uzbek transaction to date backed a $500mn, 18-year loan from commercial lenders to ACWA Power's Sirdarya gas-fired plant — a tenor that, Jin said, would have been commercially unavailable without the guarantee. A second product, used in partnership with NBU, supported a $100mn, 10-year facility from Standard Chartered specifically earmarked for onward lending to small and medium enterprises — addressing a financing gap that, as Usmonbekov noted, would have been far too operationally complex for an international bank to serve borrower by borrower. MIGA's current exposure in the country stands close to $1bn, with Jin projecting issuance of $500mn or more annually in the years ahead.

The China problem

The panel's most candid moment came when Baum was asked to name the principal obstacle to Western ECA financing in Uzbekistan. His answer was not financing structure, but Chinese competition.

"I was here some years ago, yesterday I was really overwhelmed when I looked at the streets seeing all the Chinese brands," he said, describing a market where Uzbek buyers routinely tell German suppliers their equipment costs 30% more than the Chinese alternative — and ask whether financing terms can close the gap. "Yes, we can, to some extent," Baum said, while acknowledging that matching Chinese state-backed financing costs remains a genuine struggle for OECD export credit agencies operating under shared multilateral rules.

What still needs building

Usmonbekov's closing wish list pointed to where the architecture remains incomplete: more flexible portfolio refinancing structures — citing a successful shopping-line drawdown from Austria's OeKB — and, more pressingly, trade finance coverage for Uzbek exporters extending payment terms to Western buyers of textiles, fresh produce and food products, a gap local banks currently cannot absorb alone.

The tools exist in fragments across Frankfurt, Paris and Washington. Knitting them together, the panel agreed, remains the unfinished business of Uzbekistan's next financing decade.