“There are no excellent students.” Madina Abylkasimova rated Kazakhstani banks for digitalization

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The Central Asia Fintech Summit 2026 is taking place in Almaty. Chairman of the ARRDF Madina Abylkasymova answered questions from Vitaly Volanyuk, founder of Digital Business, during the panel session. Let's talk about the main thing.

* Digital Business is the general media partner of Central Asia Fintech Summit 2026.

According to Abylkasymova, this year the ARRDF assessed the digital readiness of 94 financial organizations. It included 23 banks, 25 insurance organizations, 31 securities market participants and 15 microfinance organizations. Organizations were assessed on more than 100 parameters - from digitalization of processes and data quality to infrastructure, cybersecurity, use of AI and employee competencies.

“The results, unfortunately, showed significant differences. Of course, the leaders remain the banks, which in recent years have made huge investments in digitalization and artificial intelligence - almost 75% of banks are already using AI technologies. But there is a gap with the insurance sector, the microfinance sector and the securities market,” stated the chairman of the ARRDF.

As Abylkasymova clarified, the situation is different even within the banking sector, i.e. the largest players have invested heavily in technology, while medium and small organizations are noticeably lagging behind.

The founder of Digital Business, Vitaly Volyanuk, asked what rating on a ten-point scale can be given to market leaders today. The answer was:

“We have exact numbers. On a ten-point scale, the digital maturity index of banks is 3.66, insurance organizations - 3.4, microfinance organizations - 3.1, and securities market participants, surprisingly, are the lowest - 3.05.”

When asked whether this means that there are no outstanding financial organizations yet, the head of the ARRFR answered in the affirmative.

“There are no excellent ones, because we need to take into account the difference: we have the top ten banks that have made significant investments in IT infrastructure and artificial intelligence, and there is a second tier of medium and small banks that are not investing enough. But investing in IT alone does not guarantee results.

When we evaluate processes, we're not just looking at digital adoption - it's about employee competencies and ensuring that AI and digital tools penetrate deep into every financial organization process. We do not yet see such understanding and deep penetration into processes in all organizations.”

To bridge the gap between leaders and laggards, ARRDF, together with the National Bank, is preparing a large-scale strategy for the digitalization of the financial sector.

“We identified 1,200 specific activities and created individual development plans for each of the 94 organizations.

Individual plans cover the entire market. They provide for the development of competencies within financial organizations themselves. We have completely digitized the supervisory process and see that institutions are developing unevenly - they need to invest correctly. For this purpose, a digital office is being created at the Agency