The first credit bureau started active working in Kazakhstan

/INTERFAX-KAZAKHSTAN, Almaty, January 31, 06/ - First credit bureau LLP, founded in July of 2004, has started active working in Kazakhstan. "At present the first stage of credit bureau system creation has been completed in Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan's seven biggest banks - Alliance bank, ATFBank , Bank TuranAlem, Bank CenterCredit, Kazkommertsbank, Halyk bank of Kazakhstan, Tsesnabank, and Financial group Astana- Finance and Financial institutions association of Kazakhstan have given life to the new project, meant for development of crediting in the country", - Anvar Akhmedov the credit bureau's general director said, representing the project. He says this organization was founded on the basis of the law about credit bureaus and credit histories formation signed by the country's president on July 6 of 2004, which had been worked out by the National Bank, state financial supervision agency (FSA) with the support of USAID project on financial sector development. Creditinfo Group and Icelandic company, which is the author of the project's technical and methodical solution, took an active part in the project's realization. In the second stage of this project realization, Akhmedov says, the credit bureau plans to "attract insurance companies and expand functions, which will help users to work with information from database, and increase quality of the information". In the third project, "introduction of credit bureau scoring or borrower's estimation" is planned. The first credit bureau will pay "the rapt attention" on connection to single database by new users, such as leasing companies, telephone communication suppliers, trade networks and other. He says in the future the credit bureau plans to "work more actively with regional borrowers and borrowers-non-residents". Akhmedov says the case on borrower will be kept in the credit bureau's database for 10 years. Anvar Saidenov, chairman of the National Bank says the credit bureau lets financial institutions not only exchange information on borrowers, but will also let very quickly process credit rate, that will promote to reduction of banks' expenses, and this, in its turn, in the future may result in reduction of the rates on credits, that will promote to "growth of availability of consumer credits to many levels of population". [2006-02-02]