BUDAPEST, July 16. /Dunyo IA/.   Ádám Szentpéteri, Deputy Chairman of the Management Board and Head of Strategy and Finance at “OTP Group”, stated in an interview with the Hungarian publication “Daily News Hungary” about the transformation of “Ipoteka-Bank” in Uzbekistan into a modern universal commercial bank, reports Dunyo IA correspondent.

According to him, the agreement for the acquisition of “Ipoteka-Bank” was signed in 2022, and the process of integration and transformation commenced in 2023. The primary task has been to transform the bank, which was previously oriented predominantly toward mortgage lending, into a full-cycle financial institution.

“We are reviewing operational processes, developing banking services, modernizing IT systems, and improving the quality of customer service. One of the key directions is digitalization”,  noted the representative of the group.

He informed that the results of the transformation are already reflected in the bank's performance indicators. Following the results of 2024, the profit of “Ipoteka-Bank” amounted to around 100 million dollars and in 2025, it grew to approximately 140 million dollars.

Ádám Szentpéteri emphasized that Uzbekistan is of interest to foreign investors due to the development of the financial sector, infrastructure, technologies, the agro-industrial complex, and the consumer services sector. According to him, promising areas for Hungarian companies are digitalization, the food industry, agricultural technologies, water resources management, healthcare and education.

He also noted that the main difficulty of the bank's transformation lies in the simultaneous implementation of modernization, digitalization and integration into “OTP Group”.

“Modernization is impossible without digitalization, digitalization is impossible without organizational restructuring, and integration into OTP creates the foundation for implementing all these processes”, - he said.

Speaking about life in Tashkent, the Hungarian executive noted the high level of the city's development and comfortable conditions for foreign specialists. According to him, the residents of Uzbekistan made a particularly strong impression on him, whom he described as friendly, open, and striving for development.

“Daily News Hungary” considers that the Hungarian OTP Group views the development of “Ipoteka-Bank” as one of the key projects in the Uzbek market. The transformation of the bank should contribute to the expansion of Uzbek-Hungarian economic cooperation and the attraction of new investments.