At the XIII Congress of Kazakhstan Financiers in Almaty, the Agency for Regulation and Development of the Financial Market of the Republic of Kazakhstan used a keynote address by Chair Madina Abylkassymova to set out the regulator’s current reform agenda and headline market trends, centred on a draft new Banking Law and recently implemented prudential and consumer-protection measures. The update highlighted year-to-date growth in financial institutions’ aggregate assets to KZT 75 trillion, up 9 percent, and banking-sector assets to KZT 67 trillion, also up 9 percent, alongside reported capital adequacy above 20 percent against an 8 percent minimum and a 3.5 percent share of non-performing loans. Client deposits were reported at KZT 45.7 trillion, with household deposits reaching KZT 26.5 trillion, while insurance assets rose 20 percent to KZT 3.8 trillion and equity market capitalisation increased 22 percent to KZT 40.2 trillion. On reform, the draft Banking Law is positioned as introducing a modern regulatory model aligned with international supervisory practice, including planned “basic” and “universal” banking licences and a proportional regulation approach intended to simplify licensing requirements while preserving core stability and reporting principles; parallel measures to rebalance credit growth included raising risk-weight differentiation coefficients on unsecured consumer loans with 3–5 year maturities to as high as 350 percent, adopting a 2 percent sectoral countercyclical capital buffer and a new Debt-to-Income prudential metric with the National Bank of Kazakhstan, and restricting consumer loans with maturities over five years where borrowers have overdue bank-loan payments of more than 30 days or overdue microcredits of more than one day. Against that backdrop, lending to the economy was reported up 14.6 percent to KZT 38.7 trillion over the first nine months, with business lending up 12.1 percent to KZT 14.7 trillion and unsecured consumer lending growth slowing to 12.7 percent to KZT 11.5 trillion compared with 29.3 percent growth in 2024. On fraud prevention, the agency pointed to the 30 June 2025 adoption of a law on financial market development issues that introduces a “decision-making period” for unsecured loans of 24 hours for amounts above KZT 1 million and eight hours for amounts above KZT 600,000, and bars remote origination of a borrower’s first consumer loan without the borrower’s personal participation. Banks and microfinance organisations have also been required since January 2025 to implement their own antifraud systems to detect fraudulent and high-risk transactions in real time and to establish dedicated antifraud units.

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