BAKU, Azerbaijan, September 5. Kazakhstan Stock Exchange (KASE) plans to create KASE Clearing Center by the end of the month, Chief Specialist of the Marketing and PR Department of KASE, Angela Kubasheva, told Trend.
A clearing house is a financial institution formed to facilitate the exchange (i.e., clearance) of payments, securities, or derivatives transactions. The clearing house stands between two clearing firms (also known as member firms or participants). Its purpose is to reduce the risk of a member firm failing to honor its trade settlement obligations.
Kubasheva also noted that KASE will take measures to join the Astana International Financial Center (AIX).
"President of Kazakhstan Kaasym-Jomart Tokayev has instructed to combine the two exchanges in order to increase the capacity and liquidity of the domestic financial market. The Kazakhstan Stock Exchange will take measures to implement the instructions of the head of state with the involvement and taking into account the interests of the parties involved," Kubasheva said.
As she pointed out, the Kazakhstan Stock Exchange remains the second largest in the CIS in terms of trading volume - according to the results of 8 months, the average daily trading volume on KASE is 1.5 trillion tenge (about $3.3 billion), the average daily number of deals is more than 5,000.
Kazakhstan is looking to develop its stock market, setting this as priority. There are two stock exchanges in Kazakhstan - the Kazakhstan Stock Exchange (KASE) and the Astana International Financial Center (AIX).
On September 1, President Tokayev said that the two stock exchanges largely duplicate each other, and sometimes even compete with each other, which is redundant for the country's financial system. In order to increase the capacity and attractiveness of the domestic market, it was decided to work on potentially combining the two exchanges into a single management.
The capitalization of the Kazakhstan's stock market amounted to 37 trillion tenge (about $80.5 billion) as of August 1, 2023, having increased over July 2023 by 1 trillion tenge (about $2.2 billion) or 2.8 percent. Since the beginning of 2023, the overall growth was 3.8 percent.
The capitalization of the equity market increased by 4.7 percent or 1.1 trillion tenge (about $2.4 billion) to 23.9 trillion tenge or about $52 billion (from the beginning of 2023 - an increase of 13.1 percent). The 13.1 percent increase since the start of 2023 was primarily driven by the rising prices of shares of index companies.