Аңдатпа
Introduction: The study examines the digital transformation of Kazakhstan’s banking system over 2019-2025, when the share of non-cash retail payments rose from below 30% to roughly 89%, total banking sector assets expanded from 26.8 to 70.8 trillion tenge, and active mobile-banking users reached 26.7 million – more than the country’s 20.3 million residents. The analysis treats this as a single, multi-layered transition spanning infrastructure, regulation, business models and risk architecture. Methods: A mixed-methods design was applied. Quantitative analysis drew on monthly aggregates of the National Bank of the Republic of Kazakhstan (NBK), ARRFR, the National Payment Corporation, KZ-CERT, IMF FSAP reports, and audited statements of the largest second-tier banks. Six calendar years (2020-2025) were covered. Methods included longitudinal trend analysis, structural decomposition of payment flows, CAMEL-type ratio analysis, and content analysis of regulatory documents. Cross-validation against IMF and World Bank assessments was used to reduce single-source bias. Results: Over 2019-2025 banking-sector assets grew at a compound rate of 17.6% per year, non-cash card turnover at 43.6% per year. Annual card payments reached 224.5 trillion tenge in 2025, about 2.3 times annual GDP. Internet/mobile channels carried 81.1% of the number and 90.3% of the value of non-cash transactions by mid-2025. ROE rose from 17.4% (2020) to a peak of 32.5% (end-2024) before moderating to 27.7% in 2025; NPL90+ fell from 6.9% to a low of 3.0% in 2023-2024 and edged back to 3.8% in early 2026. The k2 capital adequacy ratio stayed between 21.0% and 25.6%, well above the 8% regulatory floor. KZ-CERT registered 16,700 incidents in 2022, 34,500 in 2023, 68,100 in 2024 and roughly 120,000 (annualised) in 2025; phone-based social engineering produced more than 10,000 victims with average individual losses of about 2.8 million tenge. Discussion: Kazakhstan illustrates a leap-frog pattern: without a deep card-infrastructure legacy, banks built mobile-first super-apps (Kaspi.kz, Halyk Super-App) absorbing public and commercial services. The model concentrates payment turnover in two ecosystems controlling roughly half of customer funds, raising systemic concentration risk alongside efficiency gains. The Digital Tenge project – 336.6 billion tenge issued in eight pilot scenarios by early 2026 – reroutes public-finance flows around commercial-bank balance sheets and creates a credible disintermediation threat. Scientific Novelty: The paper integrates payment-system, prudential and cyber-risk data into a single longitudinal framework calibrated to the Kazakhstani context. It quantifies the gap between channel digitalisation (very fast) and the build-up of incident-response capacity (lagging by roughly two years), and identifies four operational risk modes specific to a super-app-led market: ecosystem lock-in, payment concentration, programmable-money disintermediation, and AI-enabled social engineering at scale. Practical Implications: For regulators, the findings argue for treating systemically important payment ecosystems with bank-equivalent supervisory intensity, for tighter mandatory biometric authentication (in force since 1 January 2025 for online lending), and for accelerating the legal framework around programmable CBDC flows. For commercial banks, the agenda is reorientation toward value-added data services, since basic transaction revenue is increasingly captured by ecosystems and by the state through the Digital Tenge platform.