ASTANA – The number of cash withdrawals in Kazakhstan made up 14.8% of the country’s total transactions in January-February, continuing to decrease yearly since 2020, when Kazakhstan witnessed the most significant drop in cash withdrawals due to the pandemic, Ranking.kz monitoring agency reported on May 4, citing data from the National Bank.
Photo credit: moneycontrol.com.
The value of cash withdrawals by cardholders in Kazakhstan reached 3.1 trillion tenge ($6.9 billion) in two months, a 9% increase from the same period last year.
The average value of cash withdrawals keeps rising for a third year, standing at 85,400 tenge ($191.86) in the first two months of 2023.
Over this period, the city of Almaty has accounted for the most considerable value of cash withdrawals worth 823.6 billion tenge ($1.8 billion), followed by Astana with 345 billion tenge ($775 million), the Karagandy and Ulytau Regions with 227.8 billion tenge ($511.7 million) cumulatively, and Shymkent with 191.9 billion tenge ($431.1 million).
At the same time, the cities of Almaty, Astana and Shymkent have the smallest share of cash withdrawals of the country’s total card payment turnover.
Cardholders in Kazakhstan mostly prefer ATMs, having withdrawn 2.9 trillion tenge ($6.5 billion) in January-February this year, which is 14.3% more than last year.
278.9 billion tenge ($626.5 million) was withdrawn at PoS terminals, a 26.2% decline from 2022.
