BAKU, Azerbaijan, Nov. 6
By Nargiz Sadikhova – Trend:
The overall value of non-cash payments carried out in Kazakhstan countrywide from Jan. through Sept. 2020 amounted to 535 trillion tenge ($1.2 trillion), Trend reports citing Kazakhstan’s National Bank.
Thus, 93 percent of the overall non-cash payments volume accounted for payment systems of the National Bank. On average a total of 203,000 payments worth 2.7 trillion tenge ($6.2 billion) were processed daily.
The majority of the transactions carried out via the interbank money transfer system accounted for the country’s second-tier banks and non-bank organizations, whereas via the interbank clearing system – also on second-tier banks and the Treasury Committee of the Ministry of Finance.
The overall value of non-cash payments decreased by 17 percent since the beginning of 2020, whereas the volume increased by 21 percent. The National Bank said that the value decrease is due to the slow down of the business activities in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The National Bank also said that over the last five years the number of transfers increased by 40 percent, whereas the value of non-cash payments increased by 15 percent, which is mainly due to the expansion of non-cash payments use by individuals.
The number of plastic cards in circulation amounted to 44.2 million cards as of Oct. 1, 2020, which is 44.8 percent more than as of Oct. 1, 2019 (30.5 million cards).
Of the total number of cards in circulation, 33.8 million cards were debit cards, 8.8 million cards were credit cards, and 1.5 million were other types of cards.
The total number of payment systems operating in Kazakhstan as of Aug. 1, 2020, consists of 17 systems, including those of the National Bank, systems of money transfers, and systems of plastic cards.
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