ASTANA, Kazakhstan, March 1. About 5.9 million transactions worth 105.5 trillion tenge (about $233 billion) were carried out through the Interbank System of Money Transfer (ISMT) and the Interbank Clearing System (ICS) in Kazakhstan in January 2024, Trend reports.
The data from the Central Bank of Kazakhstan shows that, compared to the same period in 2023, the number of payments in these systems increased by 12.8 percent (by 669,700 transactions).
In addition, the amount of payments increased by 50.1 percent (by 35.2 trillion tenge, or about $78 billion).
Meanwhile, currently, there are two national payment systems operating on the territory of Kazakhstan: the Interbank System of Money Transfer (ISMT) and the Interbank Clearing System (ICS).
ISMT is a country's real-time gross settlement system, in which each document is processed individually and the transfer of money is carried out on the basis of each payment document. The purpose of ISMT is to process the largest and most important payments in the country.
ICS is a clearing system for retail payments in small amounts. In this system, all payments are made on a net basis. The main direction of the ICS is to carry out a large number of retail payments for small amounts. The system sets a limit on the maximum amount of one payment, equal to 5 million tenge (about $11,000).