NUR-SULTAN – The Kazakh National Bank in cooperation with 13 banks is developing instant payments to boost the country’s e-commerce industry. By the end of the year, the banks will be connected to a mobile phone payment system.
“The National Bank has introduced a project that allows using a mobile phone as a means of payment for the development of instant payments. Today, three banks are participating in the project, 10 more plan to be connected by the end of this year,” Minister of National Economy Ruslan Dalenov said at a recent government meeting.
“These are online stores, the number of which is more than 1,700 electronic trading platforms – there are more than 20, and information and advertising platforms. In general, by the end of 2018, the volume of the online trading market increased 1.5 times and reached 269 billion tenge (US$710 million),” he said.
“The share of e-commerce in Kazakhstan is 2.9 percent, the number of buyers has doubled and amounted to 2.3 million people,” Dalenov said.
According to him, the ministries of finance and information and public development, the Atameken Scientific Production Enterprise and Kazpost are improving digital and financial literacy.
“As part of the service support, Atameken trained 15,000 representatives of small and medium enterprises on doing business in the internet. This year, another 20,000 entrepreneurs will be trained,” he said.
Mobile payments refer to any payment made using a mobile phone and many payment methods have developed. One of the ways is the use of near-field communication (NFC), which is growing worldwide.
NFC phones communicate with NFC-enabled card machines using close-proximity radio frequency identification. At that, consumers don’t need to touch the point of sale with their mobile phones to transfer money. It is enough to be close to a terminal.
Among widely used digital wallets are Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and Google Pay.
