In conditions where sanctions and external restrictions create difficulties, Avina's work becomes particularly relevant. She provides specific examples, demonstrating how to make the remittance system more reliable so that funds reach recipients on time and without losses, despite global crises. Based on her extensive experience, Abytayeva offers solutions that can help preserve the well-being of thousands of families in Kyrgyzstan.
— Avina, how would you describe yourself to someone who is hearing your name for the first time? What is your professional specialization?
— My work lies at the intersection of auditing, risk management, and the reliability of financial processes. I focus on translating complex systems into understandable and verifiable questions: what dependencies exist, how decisions are made in exceptional situations, what confirms resilience, and which indicators truly reflect the quality of the system's performance. I am oriented towards practical application and substantiated facts rather than theoretical assumptions. Therefore, I am interested in topics where formal correctness does not always equate to real resilience.
Photo from personal archive
— Why did you choose cross-border remittances for individuals as your area of expertise?
— This is one of the most vivid examples of how a financial service transforms into a social and economic support. For many households, such remittances are not incidental but regular and expected.
When a service becomes mass, it ceases to be "just a product" and starts functioning as infrastructure.
For me, it is important to consider this from a professional perspective: what ensures reliability, what undermines trust, where the system may be vulnerable to external factors, and how this can be measured. I view this area as expert-driven, as it intersects risks, technologies, regulatory requirements, and human behavior.
— What prompted you to formulate the approach "this is infrastructure, not just a financial flow"?
— At some point, it became clear to me that in some countries, cross-border remittances for individuals effectively function as a basic payment service: they are regular, large-scale, and expected. Under such conditions, they become not "an additional option," but a functional infrastructure upon which everyday financial decisions of households depend.
It becomes infrastructure when people stop perceiving the remittance as an event and start seeing it as a guaranteed element of their financial reality.
Avina Abytayeva
As an auditor, I assess this in terms of resilience requirements. If the service is infrastructural by nature, it must have minimum reliability standards, which can be formulated as follows:
- availability under normal and stressful conditions;
- clear rules for users;
- manageable dependencies on partners and infrastructure;
- ability to withstand failures and recover with verifiable results.
Another important point: if a failure triggers a chain reaction at the household level and undermines trust in formal channels, it becomes not just an inconvenience, but a systemic risk. Therefore, considering this topic in the context of infrastructure allows for professional discussion based on resilience criteria rather than general assessments.
— Where do you think real vulnerabilities most often lie: in technologies, processes, or management?
— I start with analyzing the service chain and its dependencies, as this is where real risk is formed. Next, I study how rules and technologies function in real conditions, not in an ideal model. And only then do I assess how the system influences user behavior, as mass switching to alternative methods is often a consequence of opacity and unpredictability. This sequential approach is important: it allows for not just abstract debates but visually demonstrates the causes of the problem and the necessary changes.
— What aspects do you consider essential when assessing such remittances as a critically important service?
— I would highlight several areas without which a professional assessment would be incomplete. First of all, it is important to check the following:
- the ability to ensure service continuity under constraints, including the availability of alternative routes and scenarios;
- manageability of critical dependencies on infrastructure and partners, so that bottlenecks are known and controllable;
- transparency of conditions and clarity of the final cost for the recipient, to avoid the "surprise" effect;
- demonstrability of recovery after incidents, including documenting causes and actual results of measures taken.
— Why do you insistently link resilience with transparency and clarity for people?
— Because resilience manifests not in reports, but in user experience. If a person does not understand why conditions have changed, how the final amount was formed, how long conversion took, or why the operation was delayed, it undermines predictability. And predictability is the foundation of trust. When trust declines, the system faces secondary risk: users begin to seek alternatives that are less transparent and harder to control. Therefore, transparency for me is not just "service quality," but a practical element of resilience and risk management.
— How would you formulate your expert position in one clear conclusion?
— I believe that cross-border remittances for individuals in a number of countries should be perceived as critical infrastructure, which implies the need to measure their resilience and reliability based on facts. This requires a shift from discussing volumes to verifying actual functionality: what dependencies exist, how decisions are made under constraints, how the system recovers, and how clear the rules are for users. In conditions of sanction pressure, this becomes not a theory, but a practical task. The sooner the participants in the system accept this logic, the less unpredictability there will be for households and the higher the trust in formal channels.
