About the Bank
The Bank of Irad (Irad Bankı) is the monetary authority of the Irad Special Economic Zone. It was established by the Banking and Commercial Currency Act 1993 and reconstituted by the Bank of Irad Act 2008. Its head office is in Talas.
Functions
- Currency issue and reserves. The Bank is the sole issuer of som notes and coins and holds the dollar reserves that cover them.
- Supervision. It licenses commercial banks, microfinance institutions and currency exchange offices, sets reserve and capital requirements and inspects the banks.
- Payments. It operates the Bank of Irad Clearing House, where the banks keep their settlement accounts.
- Correspondent banking. It oversees the correspondent arrangements in Almaty and Istanbul through which Iradi banks make payments abroad.
The Bank does not hold the Government's accounts, which are kept at Talasbank, and has no part in the escrow of export revenue, which the Irad Foreign Trade Escrow Authority supervises.
History
The Bank of Irad was created by the Banking and Commercial Currency Act, passed by the Territorial Legislature in 1993. It opened in the autumn of 1993 in the former Talas office of the Soviet state bank and issued the first som notes late that year. In the first months both dollar banknotes and som notes were flown in to Talas Air Base. Under the 1993 act the Chairman and the other members of the Board were appointed by the Governor with the consent of the Territorial Senate.
The Bank licensed the commercial banks that opened in the late 1990s and set up the Clearing House in 1996. It kept the payment system working through the crisis of 2006–2007. In 2008 it was reconstituted under the Bank of Irad Act, which kept the currency-board rules and set the present rate of 8.40 som to the dollar.
Governance
The Bank is directed by its Board, headed by the Chairman. Under the Bank of Irad Act 2008 the Chairman is appointed by the Governor and confirmed by the Mejlis for a term of six years.
Chairman since 2010; Deputy Chairman 2007–2010 and one of the authors of the 2008 reset. Formerly a consultant to the World Bank on Central Asian financial-sector projects.
The names of the other members of the Board are given in the Annual Report.
The Bank of Irad Clearing House
The Clearing House is the interbank payment system of the ISEZ. It settles payments between the banks in dollars and in som, including salaries, pensions, tax and customs payments, and transfers between customers of different banks.
Set up in 1996, it first settled cheques and batch payments once a day. Real-time settlement of large dollar payments was introduced in 2009, backup sites in Nurzhan in 2010, and som payments were added to the real-time system in 2012. It handles payments inside the ISEZ only; payments abroad are settled through correspondent banks in Almaty and Istanbul.
Operating days: Monday to Friday, except public holidays. See Notice 2026/6.