The digital revolution is completely rewriting the rules of doing business, and those who fall behind will have a hard time catching up with more nimble competitors. New technologies are transforming companies in every industry, from healthcare and entertainment to transportation and manufacturing. The democratization of technology is a key breakthrough factor. Cloud and mobile technologies have already turned business models on their head and enabled startups to conquer entire industries, regardless of their size, but further unprecedented technological changes are just around the corner.

Vitaly Nizhegorodtsev, regional manager of SunFinance Group, told Standard.kz about what financial institutions would look like in the near future and how new technologies will affect the market.

In Kazakhstan, the fintech market has great potential
Today, the coverage of the population with access to the World Wide Web is about 98% - this is a high level of technological development. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this process. Now Kazakhstan is leading in the development of the financial technology market among the countries of Central Asia. The number of payment cards in circulation over the past five years has increased by 46.7%, to 46.8 million. Thus, today each working Kazakhstani has an average of five payment cards.

In addition, with the development of e-commerce, online lending and mobile transfers, non-cash transactions have grown significantly in the country. So, for 11 months of 2020, the volume of non-cash payments amounted to 30 trillions tenge - i.e. increased by more than 2.5 times compared to the same period in 2019. At the same time, 81.5% of non-cash payments were made online.

Today, almost all financial institutions in Kazakhstan have remote service systems, and the number of users of online services increased by 51.6% over the year, to 27 million (against 18 million a year earlier).