In the autumn of 1993 roubles were exchanged for tenge at five hundred to one, and the rules were being written as the exchange ran. Today the currency has three forms, three quarters of the reserves sit in gold, and the question the country now answers with technology is still open.
The decree was signed on November 12, 1993, the exchange opened at eight in the morning on November 15 and closed on November 20. The rate was 500 roubles per tenge, the ceiling per person 100,000 roubles, that is 200 tenge.
In the summer of 1993 the country was preparing to join a new rouble zone: letters had arrived from Yeltsin, Chernomyrdin and Gerashchenko. By late September it was clear the door was shut, and the tenge working group was reassembled.
In 1999, 2009, 2014 and in August 2015, when the rate was floated. The dollar rose from 4.7 tenge to figures a hundred times larger.
Monetary gold accounts for 77–78 per cent of the reserves, and the National Bank intends to bring the share below 75: above 80 the portfolio simply tracks the price of one metal.
The dollar holds 56.70 per cent of global reserves against roughly 71 at the turn of the century. In payments and trade finance its lead remains overwhelming, and the renminbi stays near two per cent.
Card retail was handed to Visa in the 1990s. The answer came thirty years later: since July 19, 2026 a single interbank QR has been running, operated by a subsidiary of the National Bank, and interchange fees have been halved in two years.
A 2009 article put seven charges to the world currency and proposed supranational units. Seventeen years on, not one of the units it named exists.
Programmable money solves the executive half: targeted spending, settlement without correspondent banks. The institutional half — legality, democratic process, accountability of issue — it does not touch.
Kazakhstan introduced its own money last among the large republics of the former Union, and did so in secrecy. The first decree on preparing a currency was signed as early as February 1992; by the accounts of those involved, only a handful of people knew of it. The banknotes were printed in England, the first coins came from Germany, and the country’s own banknote factory opened later, in 1995.56 Accounts and reference works
The decree “On the introduction of the national currency of the Republic of Kazakhstan” was signed; the head of state addressed the nation the same day.12
The exchange of roubles for began at 500 roubles per tenge. The ceiling for anyone over sixteen was 100,000 roubles, that is 200 tenge; sums above it went to a special account, frozen for six months while a commission checked where the money had come from.47
The exchange closed. In November 1993 the dollar was worth about 4.7 tenge.37
The notes carried Al-Farabi, Suyunbai Aronuly, Kurmangazy Sagyrbaiuly and Shoqan Walikhanov. The design was by Timur Suleimenov, Mendybai Alin, Agimsaly Duzelkhanov, Dosbol Kasymov and Khairulla Gabzhalilov.28
A chronology drawn from documents misses the main thing: until the last moment the country was preparing to stay in the rouble zone. The details were given by Grigory Marchenko, in 1993 an aide to vice-president Yerik Asanbayev and later twice governor of the National Bank, in an interview with BaigeNews.kz.25 Participant’s account
What was missing above all were the rules themselves: at what ratio to exchange, how much to hand over per person. The currency was introduced while its regulations were still being written.
From the account of a working group memberThere was a technical side as well, spoken of even less. The funds in every corporate bank account had to be converted from roubles to tenge within a single operating day; the bulk of that work fell to the National Bank’s accounting staff under Naila Abdullina. In the same period Kazakhstan became the first country in the Commonwealth to design and run its own interbank settlement system, written by its own programmers — the central banks of Japan and France helped them understand how foreign payment systems worked. This was described by Nurlan Isin, then head of the National Bank’s information technology department.26 Participant’s account
The first year of an independent monetary policy taught a lesson that chronologies tend to drop. In February 1994 the debts of enterprises were cleared against one another — the National Bank objected — and within three months the rate moved from 11 to 40 tenge per dollar, while monthly inflation reached 46.5 per cent in June 1994.25 Not an external shock, but a single management decision.
What followed is usually told as a sequence of s. It is also the story of a choice between a fixed rate and a floating one, settled in August 2015 with the move to .
The scale is logarithmic: otherwise the early years collapse into a line near zero. Hover or tap a point.
The count of devaluations is an old argument. Marchenko insists that in nine years at the head of the National Bank he carried out one, in February 2009, of 25 per cent, that the decision was taken by the board together with the government and the head of state, and that the rate then held steady for four years. Under the two governors who followed, by his count, there were three: February 2014, August 2015 and November of that year, when the rate reached 385 tenge per dollar.25
The last point on this line is curious because it runs the other way: this autumn the rate fell below 448 tenge per dollar, while the annual budget had been drawn on 540.9 For a commodity economy a stronger national currency is not an unqualified blessing, and the argument over the “equilibrium rate” continues.
An exchange rate is held up by a stock, not by promises. At the end of September 2026 Kazakhstan’s gross stood at $66.41 billion, of which $51.4 billion was gold.10 National Bank That is the distinctive feature of the Kazakh portfolio: gold makes up some 77–78 per cent of it, a high figure even by the standards of countries that have been buying the metal hard in recent years.
The National Bank considers that share excessive and intends to bring it below 75 per cent. The explanation given by deputy governor Aliya Moldabekova is plain: above 80 per cent the portfolio turns into a single-asset holding and moves with the price of one metal. The bank began accumulating gold in February 2025, when an ounce cost $2,900; today the price is around $4,000. It has bought all gold from domestic producers since 2011, and the country refines 70–75 tonnes a year.10
Data as of the end of September 2026. The National Bank intends to bring the gold share below 75 per cent.
A second story from the same week: the non-resident share of Kazakh government securities reached a ten-year high of 9 per cent, or 2.8 trillion tenge. The National Bank considers that share large enough for the economy but does not want to impose limits; it is betting instead on inclusion in the JP Morgan index, to attract longer-term investors and avoid “hot money”.10
The country is not moving to a new single anchor but to a more mixed portfolio: the drift away from the dollar and the drift away from gold are happening at once.
Conclusion of Part 2Monetary sovereignty has a second half, recalled far less often than the exchange rate: the rails the currency runs on. Kazakhstan built its interbank settlement itself, and before anyone else in the Commonwealth. Retail — what people pay in shops — it let slip.
Nurlan Isin, who ran the National Bank’s information technology department in the 1990s, says so directly: the planned retail card payment system never came about, the international company Visa took the initiative, and in domestic settlement the country became wholly dependent on it. In the same conversation he ties this to a wider problem: using foreign software means paying for it every year, money leaves the country, and questions of national security slip into the background.26 Participant’s account
The figures confirm that the dependence is not a figure of speech. On September 1, 2026 there were 84.3 million payment cards in circulation, issued by 18 banks and Kazpost; these are cards of the international Visa and Mastercard systems plus the local Kaspi.kz system.27 National Bank In July 2026 there were 20.5 million Visa cards against 17.3 million cards of local systems; annual turnover on Visa cards reached 30.2 trillion tenge, on Mastercard 7.3 trillion.28
The way out was found not in banning foreign systems but in going around them by another path — the phone instead of the card.
Sovereignty in payments turned out to be a matter of infrastructure rather than prohibition: who holds the routing and who sets the fee.
Conclusion of Part 3The link with the part on the is visible too: both lines are run by one organisation, the National Payment Corporation, and both answer the same task left unsolved in the 1990s. The difference is that then the subject was cards, and now it is a payment that bypasses the card network altogether.
The tenge lives inside a system built around someone else’s currency, and the state of that system determines what settlement, borrowing and holding reserves cost. There is a widespread view that the dollar system has exhausted itself. The data confirm half of it.
Hover or tap a point: the reading appears below. The series is drawn from IMF data published in different years; intermediate values are rounded.
What holds up. By the database, to which central banks report the currency composition of their reserves, the dollar’s share in the second quarter of 2026 was 56.70 per cent, against 57.18 a quarter earlier and roughly 71 at the turn of the century. The euro’s share rose to 20.60 per cent, and it was euro purchases that drove the increase in world reserves to $13.22 trillion.11 The World Gold Council surveyed 76 central banks between February 5 and May 19, 2026: 74 per cent expected the dollar’s share to fall over five years, and 84 per cent expected gold’s share to rise.12
What does not. There is no replacement. On SWIFT’s own figures, in June 2026 the dollar accounted for 59.10 per cent of global payments by value, and about 75 per cent once settlement inside the euro area is excluded; the renminbi stood at 2.18 per cent.13 In trade finance the gap is wider still.14 And part of the decline is exchange-rate arithmetic: in the second quarter of 2025, at constant rates, the share would have fallen by only 0.12 percentage points.15
Switch the measure: the share in reserves falls noticeably, while in payments and trade finance the dollar’s lead remains overwhelming.
The precise formulation is this: what is under way is a shift to a multi-currency system in which the dollar is still the largest participant, not a change of hegemon. And to judge that shift, what matters is less the share in reserves than the currency in which oil, metal and grain are invoiced.
The fullest Kazakh version of the charge against the world currency was set out in February 2009 by Nursultan Nazarbayev. The article appeared in Rossiyskaya Gazeta under the headline “The crisis arose from a deep global defect” and is known by the author’s own title, “Keys to the crisis”.16 Primary source
Its opening premise is strict: the crisis is not a natural disaster but the outward consequence of an inward defect, and until the defect is named any repair stays cosmetic. Seven questions to the world currency follow.
In all seven cases the answer is no, which yields the formula of a “global sevenfold genetic defect”. Two details usually get lost in retellings. First, the currency is called not unlawful but “pre-legal”: it came into being de facto before any world law existed against which its lawfulness could be judged. Second, the proposal is not limited to replacing the dollar. The load was to be shifted onto regional supranational units of account, while the national currency of any country was declared unfit for both the world and the regional role. Capital resting on the flawed currency was called a in the article and capital on a corrected one an acmetal, from the Greek acme, the highest point; the intermediate order was named transitalism. Kazakhstan had proposed a supranational unit, the “altyn”, within the Eurasian Economic Community as early as 2003, and in 2009 put forward a Eurasian supranational unit of account.16
The diagnosis did reach the global agenda, and almost simultaneously. Six weeks before the London summit, on March 23, 2009, the governor of the People’s Bank of China, Zhou Xiaochuan, argued the same case. What is needed, he wrote, is an international reserve currency with a stable value and issuance governed by rules: a supranational currency removes the risks inherent in the currency of a single country.17 Russia and a United Nations commission of experts put forward similar proposals.
The mechanism was only partly switched on. The London summit agreed to issue worth $250 billion, and in August 2021 the IMF carried out the largest allocation in its history, $650 billion. In 2016 the currency of a large developing country entered the basket for the first time.18
Hover over a segment. The weights apply from August 2022; the renminbi entered the basket in 2016.
Replacing the currency never happened. Special drawing rights remained a supplementary asset; no world law on money and no global issuing centre appeared; neither the Eurasian unit nor the “altyn” was created. Of the regional projects named at the time, only the euro became a full currency — and it had been created before the article was written.
The article has a neighbour in time that went almost unnoticed: the first bitcoin block was created on January 3, 2009, a month before publication.19 At the time no one connected the two — one belonged to interstate politics, the other to cryptography. Seventeen years later the technology grown from that root, programmable money in the hands of the state, has come close to the tasks the article set.
In Kazakhstan, though, the subject began long before bitcoin, and the present launch came after two failed attempts.
First attempt, the early 1990s. Electronic money was studied on the instruction of the National Bank’s chairman, Galym Bainazarov, at a time when the country had no cash of its own and the question was what to serve retail turnover with. With IBM’s help an American grant was obtained for a concept, several European consultants were hired, and they drafted a concept of electronic cash: the money was to have the main properties of cash and to make the same circuit. A delegation led by Oraz Zhandosov travelled to several northern European countries to judge whether the moment had come. The National Bank’s leadership concluded that it had not: too early, the more so since the country now had its own cash and the problem had lost its edge.26 Participant’s account
Second attempt, 2013. The National Bank debated who should issue electronic money: service providers, commercial banks or the central bank. It settled on the third answer and in the summer of 2013 drafted a bill on the issue of electronic money by the National Bank. The bill never reached parliament: according to Grigory Marchenko, two large banks lobbied against it and the government went along with them. His own verdict is blunt: had the bill passed, the digital tenge would have arrived seven years earlier.25
This story has a sequel that ties the Kazakh thread to the global one. Marchenko took the same idea to the People’s Bank of China — to the same Zhou Xiaochuan whose article on a supranational currency is quoted above. He did not go alone: with him was Roberto Giori, owner of the largest firm making banknote printing equipment. The Chinese side showed no interest the first time, thought it over the second, took it up the third, and by the fourth meeting the People’s Bank had a digital currency research institute of six hundred people. In 2019, in Chongqing, Zhou said publicly that the man who first brought the idea of electronic money to China was Marchenko.25
Kazakhstan offered an idea it then turned down itself; China took it up and now leads the developed world in it. The republic’s own digital currency arrived ten years later than it might have.
Conclusion of Part 6Third attempt, the present one. In 2025 the digital tenge was recognised as a new form of the national currency; by mid-2026 about 340 billion had been issued, 20 pilot projects completed, 10 more under way and 50 in preparation. Its use is mandatory across eight categories of budget spending for projects above 100 million tenge, and payments can be programmed with smart contracts.20 The National Bank has announced its intention to extend coverage to 2 trillion tenge within a year.21
| Requirement of the article | What digital money delivers | What it does not |
|---|---|---|
| Lawfulness de jure | Status fixed in law: a form of the national currency since 202520 | That is one country’s law; the technology creates no world law on money |
| Democratic issuer | Transparency of spending: the movement of budget money is visible along the chain | The issuer is unchanged; transparency of spending and a say in issuance are different things |
| Competitive market | Cross-border platforms remove correspondent banks: has handled over 4,000 transactions worth about $55.5 billion22 | Some 95 per cent of the volume is the digital renminbi; the Bank for International Settlements left the project and Saudi Arabia wound down its participation22 |
| Accountability to users | Control over the targeted use of funds works and can be measured | The control runs from issuer to user, not the other way round21 |
| Answerability of the issuer | — | The technology does not change the mechanism of answerability to users |
| Effectiveness | Dozens of projects, integration with the Finance Ministry’s systems20 | Traceability is lost at the subcontractor: a matter of rules, not of protocol23 |
Closed: the executive half. Targeted spending, settlement without correspondent banks, speed and traceability — what was a slogan in 2009 has become a working instrument.
Not closed: the institutional half. Lawfulness, democratic process, accountability and answerability of issuance are questions about how power is arranged, not about a protocol.
An argument for haste, made as early as 2020: if a national digital currency is late, its place is taken by the money of global private companies. The economy then depends not on a foreign state but on a corporation that can neither be controlled nor persuaded.25
And a correction to the optimism: programmability cuts both ways. The same properties that let the state track targeted spending also give it an unprecedented view of other people’s payments.
On November 15 the tenge turns thirty-three — the span in which a currency stops being a symbol and becomes an instrument. Behind it lie four collapses and the move to a floating rate; behind its issuer, a portfolio overloaded with gold and the intention to correct that tilt. Around it, a system slowly losing its single pole without finding a replacement.
Against that background the digital form of the national currency looks like the most substantive answer the country has given to the questions of 2009 — and an answer reached on the third attempt: the first was in the early 1990s, the second in 2013. The answer is half an answer by nature: the technology can execute, but it cannot make an issuer accountable. The part it does close, though, closes measurably — in projects, spending categories and billions routed through smart contracts.
One further consequence is worth stating. The history of the 2013 bill shows that delay in such matters costs not money but time: an idea born in Almaty became a working system in Beijing, and Kazakhstan came back to it seven years later. That is an argument not for haste but for keeping decisions of this kind clear of the interests of individual market players.
The most interesting things are happening where the technology meets the rules: traceability is lost the moment money reaches a subcontractor, and the Finance Ministry is preparing amendments. The coming year will show whether programmability becomes an instrument of order or simply another layer of reporting.
Terms used in the text. They are underlined with a dotted line: hover or press for a short note, and come here for the full entry.
The IMF database on the currency composition of official reserves, the source of figures on the share of the dollar, the euro and other currencies.
Short for Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves. Central banks report voluntarily which currencies they hold reserves in; country-level data stay confidential and only aggregate shares are published. This is where figures on the dollar’s share come from. One caveat matters: quarterly changes are partly explained not by purchases and sales but by revaluation at market rates, and gold is not counted in this database at all.
Terms from the 2009 article: “defectal” is capital resting on a flawed world currency, “acmetal” capital resting on a sound one, from the Greek acme, the highest point.
Coinages from the 2009 article, formed on the pattern of “capital”. A defectal is defective capital operating with a defective world currency; an acmetal is capital on a currency without that defect, from the Greek ἀκμή, “edge, the highest point of flourishing”, the word classical authors used for the peak of development. Between them stands the transital, an intermediate stage on a partly corrected currency, from the Latin transitus, “passage”. The corresponding orders are named defectalism, transitalism and acmetalism.
From the Latin de- (“lowering”) and valere (“to be worth”): an official reduction of the exchange rate by decision of the authorities rather than by the market.
Built from the Latin prefix de-, denoting reduction, and the verb valere, “to be worth, to have force”. Strictly, devaluation is an administrative act: the authorities announce a new, lower rate, whereas a market weakening is called depreciation. For Kazakhstan the distinction carries weight. The collapses of 1999, 2009 and 2014 were National Bank decisions on a new corridor, while after August 2015 the word has been used loosely: since then the rate has been set by the market.
A third form of the national currency alongside cash and bank deposits: issued by the central bank, with payments that can be programmed.
A central bank digital currency is a third form of national money alongside banknotes and balances in commercial banks. It differs from an ordinary transfer in that the obligation is direct, owed by the central bank, and the record is kept on its platform. Its chief practical property is programmability: a condition of spending can be attached to the money, which is then released only when the terms of a smart contract are met. In Kazakhstan the digital tenge was recognised as a form of the national currency in 2025 and is used above all in budget spending.
A monetary regime in which the central bank answers for an inflation goal while the market sets the exchange rate.
From the English target. The central bank publicly announces a goal for inflation and answers for it, steering the policy rate, while the exchange rate is released and formed by the market. Kazakhstan moved to this regime on August 20, 2015, abandoning the currency corridor. The logic of the move is that with open capital flows a country cannot hold both the exchange rate and prices at once: it has to choose what it answers for.
The stock of foreign currency, gold and claims with which a central bank meets external obligations and smooths the exchange rate.
The external assets at a central bank’s disposal: foreign currency and securities denominated in it, monetary gold, the reserve position at the IMF and special drawing rights. The purpose is twofold — to pay a country’s external obligations and to smooth exchange-rate swings. Gross reserves and net foreign-exchange assets are counted separately, which is why figures differ between reports. The share of gold in the portfolio is a question of risk management in its own right: the metal pays no interest and moves with its own price, but it does not depend on anyone else’s jurisdiction.
A platform for cross-border settlement in central bank digital currencies, without correspondent banks.
A cross-border settlement platform on a distributed ledger, grown out of a project by the central banks of Hong Kong and Thailand, later joined by the People’s Bank of China and the central bank of the United Arab Emirates. The name denotes a bridge between several central bank currencies. The point is to remove the chain of correspondent banks: payment moves directly between participants and the currencies are exchanged on the platform itself. The Bank for International Settlements, which had been the coordinator, left the project in October 2024; the overwhelming share of volume is in the digital renminbi.
The IMF’s unit of account, created in 1969; its value is calculated from a basket of five currencies.
Created by the International Monetary Fund in 1969 as a supplement to countries’ official reserves, when the contradictions of the Bretton Woods system had become visible. This is not a currency in the everyday sense: one cannot pay with it in a shop; it serves as a unit of account and as a claim on freely usable currency from other members. Its value is set by a basket: since August 2022 the dollar accounts for 43.38 per cent, the euro 29.31, the renminbi 12.28, the yen 7.59 and the pound 7.44.
From the Turkic teñge — a coin, a measure; the Russian word for money, dengi, comes from the same root. The name was chosen to anchor the new state in the pre-Mongol monetary tradition of the steppe.
The word goes back to the Turkic teñge (tanga, denge in various languages), meaning a coin, a measure, a balance; the Russian dengi entered from the same root through Turkic intermediaries in the fourteenth century. The name was chosen deliberately: work on the first banknotes began with archive material on the circulation of money in Kazakhstan in the early period of its history, and the currency’s name tied the new statehood to the pre-Mongol monetary tradition of the steppe. Those who took part recall that as a name for paper money the word circulated in the Mongol period of China and in the Golden Horde. A hundredth of a tenge is a tiyn, from the Kazakh word for a squirrel pelt, an old unit of barter; the first tiyn of 1993 were printed on paper because the mint was not ready in time.
Reliability class: A — a document or official data, B — a publication or study with a verifiable reference, C — reference and popular material.
| No. | Source | Class | What was taken |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | National Bank of Kazakhstan, “History of the national currency” | A | Decree of November 12, 1993, the date of introduction, the designers of the first series |
| 2 | Kazinform: twenty-six years of the tenge and how it changed | B | The address to the nation on November 12, the “Portrait” series, rates in 1993 and 1994 |
| 3 | Zakon.kz: how the tenge was created and changed | C | The dollar at 4.7 tenge in November 1993 |
| 4 | Lada.kz: the birthday of the tenge | C | The exchange at 500 roubles per tenge, special accounts for sums above the ceiling |
| 5 | Tengrinews: thirty-two years in the wallet | C | The secret decree of February 1992, the exchange ceiling, the first sketches |
| 6 | E-history.kz: the introduction of the national currency | C | Printing of the first batch in England, coins from Germany, the factory in 1995 |
| 7 | Reference material on the coins and banknotes of Kazakhstan | C | Opening and closing hours of the exchange, the ceiling of 100,000 roubles |
| 8 | “Kazakhstani tenge”, encyclopaedic entry | C | Denominations and portraits of the first series, the chronology of devaluations |
| 9 | Forbes.kz: the dollar fell below 448 tenge on KASE | B | The exchange rate in the autumn of 2026 |
| 10 | Interview with National Bank deputy governor Aliya Moldabekova, Reuters, November 2026 | B | Gold at 77–78 per cent and the target below 75, reserves of $66.41 billion, the JP Morgan index, non-residents at 9 per cent |
| 11 | IMF, COFER: currency composition of world reserves, second quarter of 2026 | A | 56.70 per cent for the dollar, 20.60 for the euro, reserves of $13.22 trillion |
| 12 | World Gold Council, Central Bank Gold Reserves Survey 2026 | B | A survey of 76 central banks: expectations for the dollar and for gold |
| 13 | SWIFT, Global Currency Tracker, 2026 issues | A | The dollar’s share of payments, the share excluding the euro area, the renminbi’s share |
| 14 | A 2026 review of de-dollarisation | C | Shares in trade finance; a restatement of SWIFT data |
| 15 | An analysis of COFER data: what counts as de-dollarisation | C | The effect of revaluation at market rates |
| 16 | Nursultan Nazarbayev, “The crisis arose from a deep global defect” (“Keys to the crisis”), Rossiyskaya Gazeta, February 2, 2009 | A | The seven questions, the “pre-legal” currency, defectal, transital, acmetal, the Eurasian unit and the altyn |
| 17 | Zhou Xiaochuan, “Reform the International Monetary System”, People’s Bank of China, March 23, 2009 | A | A supranational reserve currency and the role of special drawing rights |
| 18 | The IMF on special drawing rights and the review of the basket | A | The allocations of 2009 and 2021, basket weights from August 2022 |
| 19 | Reference on the first bitcoin block (January 3, 2009) | C | The launch date, for comparison with the article |
| 20 | Interfax, citing the press service of the Government of Kazakhstan, July 2026 | B | 340 billion issued, 20 projects completed, mandatory use across eight spending categories |
| 21 | Remarks by National Bank governor Timur Suleimenov at the Central Asia Fintech Summit, September 2026 | B | The intention to reach 2 trillion tenge; the remark on what the issuer can see |
| 22 | Forbes and Ledger Insights on the mBridge platform, 2026 | B | Transaction volumes, the digital renminbi’s share, the exit of the Bank for International Settlements |
| 23 | Banker.kz: an analysis of the digital tenge project | C | Traceability at subcontractors as the bottleneck |
| 24 | Informburo.kz and LS: a chronology of tenge devaluations | C | 1999, 2009, 2014 and the move to a floating rate in August 2015 |
| 25 | Grigory Marchenko: “I do not live in Switzerland, I work nowhere, I live on a pension in Almaty”. Interview by Beibit Sakhanov, BaigeNews.kz, September 29, 2020 | B | Preparations in 1993, the letters from Russia, the group at Almaly, paper tiyn, the 1994 debt clearing, the count of devaluations, the 2013 bill and the Chinese episode |
| 26 | “The electronic tenge was nearly born in the early 1990s” — Nurlan Isin. Interview by Beibit Sakhanov, BaigeNews.kz, August 5, 2020 | B | Converting accounts in one operating day, the home-built interbank system, the early-1990s electronic cash concept, the etymology of the word tenge |
| 27 | National Bank of Kazakhstan, “Payment cards and electronic banking services”, issue of September 29, 2026 | A | 84.3 million cards in circulation, 18 banks and Kazpost, the Visa, Mastercard and local Kaspi.kz systems |
| 28 | Registr TV Kazakhstan: an analysis of the share of local card systems, September 2026 | C | 20.5 million Visa cards against 17.3 million local ones, turnover, local systems at 42.7 per cent |
| 29 | Commentary of the National Bank on the interbank mobile payment system, July 23, 2026 | A | The single QR launched on July 19, the National Payment Corporation as operator, interchange fees halved |
| 30 | Profit.kz on the National Bank’s review of the payment services market, first half of 2026 | B | 350 million card transactions worth 3.3 trillion tenge; 8 million QR transactions worth 210 billion in the first month |
No sources in this class.
