Clearing

Implementation of clearing in Kazakhstan began in 1995 after ratification by the Board of Directors of the National Bank of Kazakhstan a document named “Temporary provision about Interbank clearing in Kazakhstan”. This document has been worked out for improvement and development of payment system in Kazakhstan and was based on the following Kazakhstan laws: “About the National Bank of Kazakhstan”, “About banks in the Republic of Kazakhstan” and “Temporary provision for cashless settlements in the Republic of Kazakhstan”.

At present participants of Interbank Clearing are: The National Bank of the Republic of Kazakhstan, The State Treasury of the Ministry of Finance, State Corporation “Government for Citizens”, Kazpost and commercial banks.

In order to become a “Clearing Participant” bank should sign the agreement with NPC on getting the clearing service. Also bank obligated to have an ISMT account.

Participants use the same payment system gateway called “Terminal” to deliver payment documents to ISMT or Clearing.

Payment documents in clearing are processed on multilateral basis. As clearing amasses a huge number of retail payments, the clearing funds turnover increases. Funds for settlement are required only once at the end of the operational day and necessary amounts for participants with short positions are equal to their clearing net debit positions and limited to their balances in ISMT. Clearing doesn’t have any pre-funding and use for settlement participants’ money in ISMT just once a day.

Clearing main features:

1. All Kazakhstan banks or financial institutions, carrying out limited types of banking operations (State Corporation “Government for Citizens”, treasure and etc.) could be the members of clearing.
2. System accepts only electronic payment documents and after final settlement deliveries electronic confirmations to users made in accordance with approved formats (MT100, MT102).
3. Maximum payment amount must not exceed 5.000.000 tenge.
4. Participants have an opportunity to send payments with value date T+3. Such payments are stored in the system until actualization of the payment date.
5. Participants can cancel payments from the waiting queue until settlement has taken place.
6. Participant may use several payment system gateways “Terminals” to enter the system, one of which will be considered as the main one.

Operating day of Clearing

Clearing is functioning on the multilateral basis without preliminary deposition of funds

A new operating day begins at 5 p.m.

It accepts documents twenty-four hours a day, 7 days a week, the final settlement of all cleared documents is carried out from 3.00 p.m. till 5.00 p.m.

There are no bilateral debit and credit limits.

Risks in Interbank clearing are managed by “queue unwind” method.

While processing the payment Clearing also checks the following:

• Compliance with accepted messages formats;
• Accuracy of digital electronic signature;
• Exclusivity of reference;
• Bank Identification Code (BIC) correctness of remitter and recipient;
• Check bits of remitter’s and recipient’s accounts;
• Correspondence to current value date;
• Rights to send a payment for remitter and accept right for recipient;
• Presence of Uniform Classifier for Designating Payments;
• Conformance with existing limit on maximum payment amount.

In the case of check failure the payment is rejected with delivering to remitter a message (MT905), containing code and the name of a mistake. If check was successful, Clearing put payment in a waiting queue and recalculates net positions. During the operational day, by participant requests, Clearing generates electronic reports with the following information:

• Number and value of payments sent by participant;
• Number and value of incoming payments;
• Number and value of rejected payments with mistake codes indication;
• Number and value of incoming payments cancelled from the queue by originator;
• Current participant net position.

uch reports allow participant to have full information about it net position in the Clearing, manage liquidity, plan and regulate payment balance and form payment outflows, and etc. All accepted during operational day payment messages are kept in a queue by FIFO principle (first in-first out) until the final settlement takes place.

Before final settlement, during operational day, participants may cancel own payments from the system. Participants also assign messages’ priorities according to their internal policy.

The operational day closes at 3 p.m. T+0. Clearing stops accepting incoming payments and calculates final net positions for each participant on the current value date. Payments are processed in accordance with priority codes and inside one priority by FIFO principle.

Having calculated final net positions, Clearing reserves necessary funds on ISMT accounts of participants with debit net positions. Final settlement takes place in ISMT.

In case of unavailability of necessary funds, Clearing blocks all available amount in the participant’s ISMT Account and performs “unwinding” procedure of the participant queue by FIFO principle unless the cover become sufficient. So, Clearing cancels the payments with the lowest priority and sends notification to Originator.

After final settlement, Clearing generates a set of the following reports for each participant:

• Total settled payments report
• Non-settled payments report
• Outgoing payments sliced by message types and accepting time report
• All detailed incoming payments