The Agency for Regulation and Development of the Financial Market of the Republic of Kazakhstan has published its key priorities for securities market supervision in 2026, aimed at improving supervisory effectiveness and making regulatory actions more transparent and predictable. It also plans, jointly with the National Bank, to develop a stock market development programme through 2030 and to carry out extensive work on drafting a new Law on the Securities Market. The planned 2030 programme envisages comprehensive reforms, including leveraging synergies between Kazakhstan’s two financial centres, strengthening the competitive advantages of a common stock market, creating enabling regulation for the development of the digital financial assets market, and improving the regulation of Islamic finance instruments. It also includes measures to facilitate private-sector access to capital markets, support initial public offerings by small and mid-cap companies, digitally transform market infrastructure organisations to develop the market as a financial centre for Central Asia, the Caucasus and Mongolia, and reform pension asset management to expand investment opportunities for private asset managers. The proposed securities law reform is expected to liberalise rules for issuers’ market entry, raise corporate governance standards, introduce a new organisational and legal form with simplified disclosure and capital-raising requirements, and set rules for the issuance and circulation of Islamic finance instruments and digital financial assets. On supervision, priorities for 2026 include developing risk-based supervision through tighter prudential requirements, increased oversight of algorithmic trading and trading platforms, and measures to prevent illegal activity by unlicensed persons. The Agency also plans to expand the scope of its new supervisory assessment model and to develop and approve an internal instruction for conducting supervisory assessments.

Original source View in tracker