Kazakh banks purchased $38.6 billion on the over-the-counter market, spending about 17.8 trillion tenge on these operations. According to analysts at DATA HUB, this volume is the highest since 2015, reports infohub.kz.
In August 2026, financial institutions bought $38.6 billion in OTC transactions, up 13% from the previous month. Based on the average exchange rate for the month, about 17.8 trillion tenge was spent on currency purchases. Overall, the volume of purchases of the American currency was a record for the banking system over the past eleven years.
Experts at the First Credit Bureau noted that abnormally high volumes of dollar purchases have been recorded for eleven consecutive months. Banks buy more than $30 billion in currency every month. For comparison, in January-September 2025, similar operations did not exceed $10 billion per month. Foreign banks are the main buyers of dollars, accounting for $33 billion of the total.
Dollar sales also rose 11% to $38.4 billion. As a result, net currency purchases by banks (the difference between purchases and sales) amounted to $212 million. This figure is lower than in March and January 2026, although in other months of this year, net dollar sales were observed.
Earlier it was reported that the volume of net dollar purchases by the population decreased slightly: from 126.5 billion tenge in June to 123 billion tenge in July.