Kazakh banks recently restructured and decreased their foreign debt to 30 billion tenge (US$161 million).
“A determined effort was made to restructure foreign debts of corresponding banks, which led to a decrease of the debts from 40 to 10 billion tenge (from US$215 million to US$53 million), which is a very modest number for second-tier banks,” said National Bank Chairman Kairat Kelimbetov.
He also noted that the state sold its shares of the banks, saying, “BTA Bank was united with Kazkommerzbank and as of today this is one of major banks of the country and it has a good, ambitious development programme.”
Kelimbetov said that the government is going to support commercial banks, financing 500-600 billion tenge (US$2.7 billion-US$3.2 billion) in 2015.
“Last year, the National Bank provided 2 trillion tenge (US$10.7 billion) of liquidity using exchange swaps and retirement assets,” he added.
Also, the National Bank chairman said that the main target of the National Bank is to provide short-term liquidity. But, he added, banks are currently able to provide short-term liquidity to one another at low rates without the National Bank.
Kelimbetov explained the low activity of the nation’s banks, saying, “Banks aren’t very active in crediting. I consider that the problem is in the lack of good credit users. There are not many good credit users today.”
The National Bank set the task for second-tier banks to decrease the level of problem loans to 10 percent before 2016.
