Almaty power

The Central Asian city of Almaty may not jump to mind when speculating on the next big regional finance center.

The Central Asian city of Almaty may not jump to mind when speculating on the next big regional finance center. Then again, Kazakstan sits on proven oil reserves of about 14 billion barrels, and its biggest city -- Almaty, population 1.3 million -- is flush with cash. Now a 26-year-old graduate of New York’s Columbia University is working to make Almaty a regional magnet for financial trade. Her deadline? January 2006.

Not a problem, says Madina Abylkasymova, the director of public policy analysis at Kazakstan’s Center for Marketing and Analytical Research -- and Almaty native -- who’s in charge of the massive project. “We believe that if we move fast, we can be an international center,” she says. “First, we need to establish ourselves as a regional center of excellence.”

After earning her master’s degree from Columbia’s School of International & Public Affairs in 2003, Abylkasymova returned to Almaty. She had been home for only a few weeks when her former boss, Kairat Kelimbetov -- now Kazakstan’s Economics minister -- asked her to head up the International Financial Center of Almaty project. Abylkasymova now leads a small local team working on the project in liaison with the Boston Consulting Group.

The push to become a regional financial center, modeled after Dublin or Dubai, will surely be welcomed by investment-seeking Kazak pension funds, whose assets now total $4.5 billion and are growing by at least $800,000 annually. And then there’s the booming commercial bank deposit market, which to date has doubled every year since 2000. Kazakstan’s banks tend to invest abroad, usually in Russia. Almaty aims “to get the Russians to come to us rather than us going to them.” The center will start off trading in bonds, exchange-traded funds and special-purpose vehicles for tax and legislative regimes. Within five years it plans to develop international equity markets and launch Islamic investments; nearly half of Kazakstan’s 15 million citizens are Muslim.

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