The Agency for Regulation and Development of the Financial Market of Kazakhstan (ARFRF) has denied any role in setting tariffs for the unified QR code, stating that this falls under the authority of the National Bank, according to infohub.kz.
In a statement, ARFRF said criticism over tariffs is unfounded. Under the Law "On the National Bank of the Republic of Kazakhstan," regulation of payment systems and the introduction of the unified QR code fall exclusively within the National Bank's remit. The agency emphasized it does not regulate tariff policy in this area.
ARFRF highlighted its direct functions, citing supervisory statistics. Since 2021, licenses have been revoked from 127 microfinance organizations and 135 collection agencies for various violations. Between 2024 and 2026, 55 microfinance organizations and 29 collection agencies lost their licenses. Administrative fines imposed exceeded 500 million tenge.
To reduce household debt in 2025, debts and penalties were fully or partially written off for 33,900 borrowers, and the debts of 722,000 clients were restructured. In 2024, ARFRF, jointly with the National Bank, mandated caps on annual effective interest rates: for unsecured bank loans and microloans — from 56% to 46%; for secured loans — from 56% to 40%; for online microloans up to 45 MCI — the maximum daily rate was reduced from 1% to 0.3%.
Anti-fraud efforts are carried out through the National Bank's Anti-Fraud Center. Since early 2025, over 163,000 fraudulent transactions worth 68 billion tenge have been prevented, with an additional 28.9 billion tenge in transactions blocked. Legislatively, the regulator introduced mandatory biometric identification, "cooling-off periods," and in-person requirements for first-time loans. These measures expanded grounds for out-of-court and court debt write-offs, allowing banks and microfinance organizations to cancel 1,600 fraudulent loans totaling 1.9 billion tenge in 2025.
The financial regulator's denial comes amid business discontent over the technical implementation of the unified bank QR code. Small and medium-sized businesses complain about the high cost of the new tool: when paying through another bank's app, the interbank fee reaches 1.25–1.35%. In comparison, traditional payments via contactless services like Apple Pay, Google Pay, or Samsung Pay cost merchants around 0.59%. As a result, a boycott call has spread on social media, urging customers to temporarily avoid the new payment method until tariffs are revised.