ASTANA, Kazakhstan, September 4. Kazakhstan's Interbank Clearing System (ICS) completed about 32 million transactions worth 6.5 trillion tenge (approximately $13.5 billion) from January through July 2024, Trend reports.
The Central Bank of Kazakhstan's data indicates that the number of payments increased by 15.1 percent (4.2 million) and the quantity of payments increased by 7.2 percent (431.5 billion tenge, or approximately $893 million) since the same period in 2023.
On average, 223,500 transactions worth 45.1 billion tenge (about $93.4 million) passed through this system per day, which is 12.7 percent more in number (by 25,200 transactions) and 4.9 percent (by 2.1 billion tenge, or about $4.35 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 that processes each payment document separately and transfers funds based on them. 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).