ASTANA, Kazakhstan, September 4. During the first seven months of 2024, Kazakhstan's Interbank System of Money Transfer (ISMT) saw circa 16.8 million transactions, raking in a mind-boggling 820 trillion tenge (approximately $1.7 trillion), 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 21.5 percent (by 3 million transactions) and the amount of payments by 58.1 percent (301.4 trillion tenge, or about $623 billion).
On average, 117,400 transactions worth 5.7 trillion tenge (about $11.8 billion) passed through this system per day, which is 18.9 percent more in number (by 18,700 transactions) and 54.8 percent (by 2 trillion tenge, or about $4.13 billion) in amount compared to the same period in 2023.
Meanwhile, currently, there are two national payment systems running the show 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).