The Analytical Center of the Association of Financiers of Kazakhstan (AFK) has published a review of factoring prospects. The instrument should help small and medium-sized businesses cover cash gaps without taking out traditional collateralized loans.
What happened
According to AFK, the total volume of accounts receivable of Kazakhstani enterprises exceeded 52.2 trillion tenge at the end of 2025. Of this, more than 43.5 trillion tenge is short-term debt. This exact amount represents the potential base for the development of factoring in the country.
Factoring allows financing already existing monetary claims. If a supplier ships goods to a large buyer with deferred payment, the bank pays the supplier the money immediately, and later collects the debt from the buyer.
Country and market
The share of SMEs in Kazakhstan’s economy has reached 40.9% of GDP. At the same time, only 23.9% of enterprises have bank loans or credit lines, and only 13.9% of companies use working capital financing. About 37% of businesses are completely restricted in their access to credit due to a lack of collateral or strict financial reporting requirements.
Banks are already looking for new approaches to serving entrepreneurs. Earlier, Finteqstan wrote that Halyk Bank completed the acquisition of the online cash register service re:Kassa to expand its ecosystem. The launch of mass factoring could be the next step, allowing banks to monetize the transactional activity of clients.
Analysts cite Turkey as a benchmark. There, factoring is integrated into corporate banking, and the non-performing loan (NPL) ratio for such operations in 2024 was 1.7% — which is lower than for regular SME loans (1.98%).
Why it matters
For banks, factoring opens up the opportunity to develop Supply Chain Finance. By serving one large corporation, a bank can automatically finance dozens of its small suppliers.
For banks, factoring is a way to safely grow their SME portfolio by relying on the payment discipline of large corporate clients, rather than on the collateral of the suppliers themselves.
What’s next
To scale factoring, the market will need digital infrastructure. In Turkey, the growth driver was a centralized registry of monetary claims, which eliminated the risk of double financing the same invoices. In Kazakhstan, the further development of electronic document management and bank APIs could become the foundation for a similar system.