HUMO Pay
Launching the first tokenization system in Uzbekistan
Client profile
HUMO is a domestic payment network in Uzbekistan, with its cards issued by all significant Uzbekistani banks. HUMO is owned and operated by the National Interbank Processing Centre (NIPC), the national switching system of Uzbekistan. HUMO is also a principal member of Visa, Mastercard, and Union Pay.
Project objectives
In early 2020, seeing the rapid development of tokenization services worldwide and the expansion of OEM wallets like Google Pay and Apple Pay, HUMO wanted to offer such services to the local customers in Uzbekistan as well. Unfortunately, the Uzbekistani market at the time was not a priority for Google Pay and Apple Pay and these OEM wallet service providers had no plans of expanding to Uzbekistan for the foreseeable future. Moreover, since HUMO domestic operations on HUMO cards are processed by the NIPC differently than the foreign ones, it most likely wouldn’t be possible to tokenize HUMO cards in OEM wallets and use these tokens for domestic transactions anyway. So HUMO decided to build a fully autonomous tokenization service of its own, that would generate, store and manage tokens issued for all HUMO cards in the country.
Offered solution
One of the distinct advantages of the Cloud Based Tokenization Platform is the CBP module, which allows domestic networks to build their own tokenization services in their domestic markets. There are only a few vendors in the world who offer systems with such features, and since D8 Corporation is one of them, HUMO chose to work with D8 as the company that already has a strong presence in Central Asia.
D8 Corporation offered Cloud Based Tokenization Platform with CMS connectors, Tokenization engine and Issuer Wallet connectors included. Within the Tokenization engine, Token Service Provider (TSP) and Cloud-Based Payments (CBP) components are tightly integrated, because HUMO is the sole tokenization service provider that is responsible for handling all token lifecycle requests and at the same time is the centralized token issuer and storage vault (roles that in international payment network implementations are played by Visa VTS and Mastercard MDES services).
HUMO uses a set of API interfaces that come with CMS connectors module to provide subscription access to tokenization service for all banks in Uzbekistan that issue HUMO cards and want to tokenize them in the system.
Issuer Wallet connectors module is used for connecting different banks to the service by integrating Issuer Wallet SDK into each bank’s mobile banking app. As of 2022, 22 banks already integrated SDKs into their mobile apps and are connected to HUMO tokenization service.
Project results
HUMO became the first tokenization service that was launched in Uzbekistan, and to date is still the most widely used service with the biggest total market share. Customers are happy with the service, and, as Shukhratbek Kurbanov, the director of National Interbank Processing Centre LLC commented, “this technology allows you to pay by using your phone, making it unnecessary to carry a card with you. We are sure that users will value speed, convenience and security of making payments with HUMOPay.” You can see a couple of screenshot examples of wallets that HUMO’s banking clients have integrated SDK into and connected to HUMO tokenization service.
