ARDFM doubles MFI capital requirements and introduces a cooling-off period for online loans
Kazakhstan’s Agency for Regulation and Development of the Financial Market (ARDFM) has imposed new restrictions on microfinance organizations, capping interest rates and doubling minimum capital requirements. The regulator also banned issuing new loans to clients with active delinquencies and extended the ban on transferring individual debts to debt collectors.
The new rules directly alter the economics of microcredit products. The maximum rate is now fixed at 0.3% per day, and the annual effective rate cannot exceed 179%. The online loan segment faces an additional infrastructure requirement: a mandatory 24-hour cooling-off period between the application and the disbursement of funds.
The tightening of product parameters coincides with a massive market cleanup. According to industry sources, the regulator has conducted over 800 inspections since 2023, resulting in fines totaling 693.4 million tenge. During this time, 99 MFIs had their licenses revoked, and 47 collection agencies were removed from the specialized registry.
Lending market oversight is tightening across Central Asia. Finteqstan previously reported how regulators fined dozens of banks and MFIs in Uzbekistan for loan advertising violations. In Kazakhstan, the focus has shifted from marketing to the product structure itself and the companies’ safety margins.
The restriction on issuing new loans to delinquent borrowers ends the practice of refinancing, where clients took out a new microloan to pay off an old one. Combined with the doubled capital requirements, this creates a barrier that many small players will fail to overcome. The microcredit market is undergoing forced consolidation, where only large platforms with sufficient liquidity for the new capital standards will survive.
In the coming months, fintech companies operating in the BNPL and microcredit segments will have to rebuild their scoring models. Extending the moratorium on selling debts to collectors until May 1, 2027, means MFIs will have to manage their troubled portfolios internally, requiring additional investments in in-house collection services.