ASTANA, Kazakhstan, June 18. Kazakhstan's Interbank Clearing System (ICS) completed about 18 million transactions worth 3.5 trillion tenge (approximately $7.7 billion) from January to April 2024, Trend reports.
The data of the Central Bank of Kazakhstan shows that compared to the same period in 2023, the number of payments increased by 13.3 percent (by 2.1 million) and the amount of payments increased by 9 percent (288.2 billion tenge, or about $636 million).
On average, 222,200 transactions worth 42.9 billion tenge (about $94.8 million) passed through this system per day, which is 10.5 percent more in number (by 21,100 transactions) and 6.3 percent (by 2.6 billion tenge, or about $5.7 million) in amount compared to the same period in 2023.
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).