Banking development is not ordinary development. Every change passes through regulatory requirements, integrates with a legacy core banking system, and touches money and customers' personal data. A mistake in scoring or a payment gateway costs not a sprint but a licence. Since 2021 SOWA Digital has been building teams and running projects for banks and fintech companies in Uzbekistan with that specificity in mind — from legacy core integration to PCI DSS compliance.
Four areas where an external team is needed most often: the customer-facing front end, money in motion, risk control, and compliance. Here is what we work on specifically.
Web and mobile applications for retail and corporate customers: statements, transfers, bill payments, card and deposit management. We design on top of the existing core banking system — we do not rewrite the banking core, we build the customer layer that integrates with it correctly through APIs or file exchange.
We separately address the UX debt of legacy interfaces: older internet banks often lose customers on simple flows such as repeating a transfer or confirming a payment.
Connecting card processing, payment gateways and local instant payment systems. We work with 3-D Secure, card tokenisation, operation idempotency and transaction reconciliation — the details where money is usually lost in a careless integration.
We design retry logic and handling of stuck payments separately: this is what banks most often underestimate at the requirements stage.
Decision systems for credit applications and real-time transaction monitoring for signs of fraud. We build data collection pipelines, rule engines and integrations with external bureaus — with the decision explainability the regulator requires.
We separate the scoring model from business rules: this speeds up later tuning without involving developers for every change.
We design the architecture and development processes so they do not conflict with the regulator's requirements for banking IT infrastructure or with the PCI DSS standard for handling card data: network segmentation, encryption, access logging, separation of privileges.
Where needed we audit the existing system and prepare it to pass an external compliance review.
In banking, a data breach or payment service downtime is not a reputational risk but direct financial loss for customers and fines for the bank. We build security requirements into the development process from day one rather than adding them retroactively before an audit.
We work to a certified information security management system — from access control to incident response. This also covers how our engineers work with your codebase and data.
The confidentiality agreement is signed before any technical documentation, access or architecture detail is handed over — it is the standard entry point to a project, not a separate service on request.
Security-focused code review, dependency control, separation of development and production environments, minimising the team's access rights to live data — practices built into our development process, not tied to a particular project.
We document architectural decisions and processes so they withstand review by the bank's internal and external auditors — including change traceability and logging of access to sensitive data.
Indicative figures for projects of this profile — an illustration of scale, not a guarantee for a specific bank: timelines and team composition always depend on the integration scope and the state of the legacy system.
Yes. We design architecture, development processes and data storage taking into account the regulator's requirements for banking IT infrastructure in Uzbekistan. If the bank already has an in-house compliance team, we work alongside it — this speeds approval up rather than slowing it down.
We work to ISO 27001, sign an NDA before any technical discussion begins, separate the team's access to live data on a least-privilege basis, and build security review into the development cycle rather than running it once before release.
Yes, this is a common and sensible first step — especially if the system was built by another team or you need to understand PCI DSS readiness before starting integration. Such an audit is part of our tech consulting: you get an independent assessment of architecture, bottlenecks and risks before investing in development.
It depends on whether the bank has its own tech lead and development management process. If it does, outstaffing is usually more effective: engineers embed into your team and processes. If you need an end-to-end result with full delivery responsibility, then outsourcing. We discuss this at the first meeting based on your current structure.
Tell us about the task — we will propose an engagement format and assemble a team in 14 days. Examples of delivered projects are in our portfolio.
Discuss a project