TBC Bank Group

This is The Conviction Play. TBC Bank Group, banking. Part of our Capital Formation series, which looks at the businesses that build and allocate capital in frontier and emerging markets. This is the piece we published on it in December 2025, and the figures in it are from then.

TBC Bank Group is the other of Georgia's two dominant banks, headquartered in Tbilisi and listed in London. Retail, small and medium business, and corporate clients, served through one of the strongest mobile banking platforms in the Caucasus. Georgia now ranks among the region's leaders in digital banking adoption, and TBC is at the centre of that.

Two dominant players, rational competition, conservative supervision and relatively high financial penetration. That structure is the durable advantage. It is a market where scale institutions keep their returns rather than competing them away, which is not true of most banking markets anywhere.

Beyond Georgia, TBC is building in Uzbekistan, and the arithmetic there is the interesting part. Uzbekistan's population is roughly ten times Georgia's, and formal financial usage is still early in its development. A digital-first bank that has already done this once, in a market that has barely started, is optionality of a kind that does not show up in this year's numbers.

Georgia's economy itself is open, with low public debt and a banking sector supervised conservatively. It is also a place people travel to on purpose. One of the oldest winemaking cultures anywhere, and mountains carrying a real tourism economy. For a retail bank that is not scenery. Visitors are card volume, deposits and demand for credit.

At the time of writing, return on equity was running in the twenties and had done consistently across reporting periods. Core capital ratios sat comfortably above the regulatory minimum, which for a bank is the difference between resilience and hoping. Liquidity was supported by a diversified deposit base, conservative management of maturities, and access to international institutional funding.

The same reasons as its neighbour, and they are honest ones. Modest market capitalisation, limited index representation, lower liquidity and geopolitical perception. Those characteristics screen the bank out of institutional mandates. They do not touch its operating strength or its balance sheet.

The piece lists them and does not soften them. An open economy is an advantage in growth and an exposure in a shock. Currency movements reach a foreign shareholder before anything about the bank does. Supervision is strong, and changes to it would still move profitability. Geopolitical perception moves sentiment more than fundamentals do. Scaling in Uzbekistan means a new regulator and a new market, which is the cost side of the growth story rather than an objection to it. Frontier listings trade thinly, so a position is easier to build than to leave. And the one that matters most for any bank: a loan book is only as good as the cycle it has been tested through.

And the case against is not a foolish one. Returns in the twenties, sustained for years, may say as much about a young credit market as about this particular bank. Financial penetration rising from a low base flatters everybody lending into it, and the test of whether a lender is genuinely better than its market is what happens when that market stops growing. Nothing in the record settles that yet.

Strip out everything else and this is the other half of a two-bank market, earning returns most European banks do not, lending with a discipline that has held through more than one cycle, and now building a second business in Uzbekistan. The risks above are real and worth holding in mind. Stating them plainly is not a hedge against any of that.

Two things to declare, and they point the same way. The author owns shares in TBC Bank Group and may buy more or sell them without saying so, and he thinks well of the business, which is usually why somebody owns a thing. Weigh the risks and the case against accordingly. They are stated above in full.

The full piece on TBC Bank Group is on the site. Free, no email address, no paywall, at the conviction play dot com.

A note before we finish. This episode is narrated by a synthetic voice, not by the author. It is an assessment of business quality, not a view on the share price: nothing here is a valuation, a price target, or a recommendation to buy or sell anything. A company can sit outside one of our frameworks and still be a fine business and a fine investment, and we publish those too, with the reason, because an assessment that only speaks about its winners is marketing. The Conviction Play publishes general commentary for information only. It is not investment advice, and capital is at risk. This reflects what was known on the day it was recorded.

That was TBC Bank Group, from The Conviction Play. Thank you for listening.