The Central Bank intends to impose financial penalties on banks for specific instances of automated teller machine (ATM) cash withdrawal failures. Central Bank governor Timur Ishmetov announced this on June 13 during a plenary session of the Senate, where the regulator presented its annual operational report for 2025.
Senator Kutbidin Burkhanov recalled that the issue of public grievances regarding technical glitches during ATM usage had been raised at the previous plenary session.
"Last year, there were 290,000 instances where technical errors prevented ATMs from dispensing cash during debit card withdrawals, or caused the machines to retain the cards," he stated.
According to the senator, nearly 10,000 of these complaints took more than 15 days to resolve, and in over 3,000 cases, citizens resorted to contacting law enforcement. "This means police officers were tied up handling these issues instead of focusing on crime prevention—a point we have previously emphasized," the senator remarked.
He underscored that the issue is not isolated to a single institution, but rather involves technical malfunctions across various commercial banks, including state-owned entities.
Kutbidin Burkhanov asked the Central Bank chief to outline the measures being taken by the regulator to expedite resolutions for citizens and prevent similar occurrences in the future.
Timur Ishmetov acknowledged the existence of the issue, noting that 291,000 card-related incidents were officially recorded last year.
"First, to look at this in relative terms to see whether this is a large or small figure: a total of 341 million operations were processed through ATMs over the year. This means there were 291,000 such incidents out of 341 million transactions. That constitutes roughly 0.07% to 0.08%," the Central Bank chief explained.
At the same time, he noted that roughly 85% of these incidents were not directly caused by the banks themselves.
"According to our statistics, about 20% of cases occurred because the amount requested by the client did not match the cash denominations available in the ATM. Another 20% involved blocked cards or incorrect PIN entries. Approximately 15% were due to network connectivity issues, and about 10% were caused by power outages," Timur Ishmetov reported.
The remaining 16%, or roughly 46,000 cases, were indeed linked to the operations of banks and payment system operators, he noted.
The Central Bank governor stated that the regulator cannot police every single transaction, as ATM operations fall under the customer service domain of the individual banks. "This is ultimately a question of their corporate attitude toward clients and the quality of their service delivery," he said.
Nevertheless, he added that the Central Bank has begun reviewing these systemic issues through the lens of consumer rights protection.
"Developing new regulatory standards naturally takes time. On one hand, banks are commercial entities, and we must avoid suffocating their business or imposing rigid prohibitions that would hinder their operations. Therefore, we have chosen this path: we will gradually develop these regulations, but we are keeping the banks informed well in advance about the direction we are chiefing," the chief of the regulatory body announced.
He noted that in a recent official advisory letter, the Central Bank instructed commercial financial institutions to upgrade the maintenance of their infrastructure. The bank was explicitly told to treat cash withdrawal failures not merely as technical glitches, but as potential violations of consumer rights.
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