Frequently asked questions

CentaPay is a regulated payment facilitator built for cross-border trade into Central Asia. We give international businesses and licensed payment service providers a single integration to collect payments from consumers in the region using the local methods those consumers actually use, and to send funds back out to beneficiaries there. Every flow we handle is cross-border by design.

The founding team has spent two decades in cross-border payments and compliance at Worldpay, Alipay, Revolut, OpenPayd, Banking Circle and Ernst & Young, with operational leadership based in Astana. Full profiles are on our team page.

Our registered office is in the Astana International Financial Centre, at 10 Dinmukhamed Qonayev Street, Emerald Tower, 3rd Floor, Esil district, Astana Z05H9A7, Republic of Kazakhstan. Our finance and financial crime functions are based full-time in Astana, with commercial and executive presence in the United Kingdom.

CentaPay Ltd is incorporated in the Astana International Financial Centre with Business Identification Number 260740900699, and is authorised by the Astana Financial Services Authority as a Money Service Provider under Licence Number AFSA-A-LA-2026-0017. Our authorisation is a matter of public record and can be verified directly on the AFSA public register.

Our client and partner agreements are governed by English common law within the AIFC legal framework. For counterparties whose legal teams work in common law jurisdictions, this removes a significant part of the diligence burden that a purely domestic structure would create.

Write to [email protected]. Tell us whether you are a payment service provider, an enterprise merchant or a financial institution, and roughly what volumes and markets you have in mind, and we will route you to the right person.

We work with licensed payment service providers and enterprise merchants only. All clients are classified as Professional Clients under AFSA conduct of business rules, and we do not provide services to retail consumers. We also do not onboard businesses domiciled in Kazakhstan, since our licence and our model are built for cross-border flows.

Kazakhstan with QR bank transfer, Uzbekistan with HUMO and UZCARD, and Pakistan with local e-wallets, with Kyrgyzstan and Azerbaijan planned. Sandbox and production timing for every market is published on the coverage table. One integration, built to add markets without a second one.

Payers transact in their local currency - tenge, som or rupee depending on the market. Settlement to you is in US dollars as standard. Other settlement currencies can be discussed case by case, depending on your banking arrangements and volumes.

Pricing depends on your volumes, the payment methods you need, the markets you operate in and which of our two operating models fits you. We do not publish a rate card, because a number set without knowing those variables would be meaningless. Get in touch and we will quote against your actual flows.

You integrate once, server to server, against a single API. Full technical documentation is published on our developer pages, including a machine-readable OpenAPI specification and a markdown version of the guide for AI-assisted integration. A sandbox with test credentials is available before you commit. Client engineering teams typically complete the technical work in two to four weeks, depending on how much of the flow you already have built.

We aim for settlement on a T+1 basis. Actual timing depends on the payment method, acquirer cut-off times and the banking calendars of the markets involved, so the applicable cycle is confirmed for you specifically in your commercial agreement rather than promised generically here.

Yes. Under our payment facilitator model, a licensed payment service provider can bring its own merchant portfolio to us. Each sub-merchant receives its own individual merchant identifier - we do not pool, aggregate or blend identifiers - so transaction reporting stays transparent at the sub-merchant level for you, for us and for the acquiring institution. Each sub-merchant is subject to pre-approval. The model is built for enterprise portfolios rather than long-tail volume.

Standard know-your-business diligence: corporate documents, evidence of your own regulatory authorisation, ownership and control structure, details of your compliance framework, and information about the flows you intend to process. If you are bringing sub-merchants, we will also need to review that portfolio. We will give you the full requirement list at first contact rather than drip-feeding it.

Yes. We support disbursements into the region, including content creator payments, marketplace seller payouts, refunds and documented business-to-business remittance. We do not support person-to-person transfers.

We serve most legitimate digital commerce, with a defined list of categories we do not accept and a further list we accept only with enhanced diligence. Both lists are published in full on our prohibited and restricted services page, so you can check your business type before making an enquiry.

No. We do not onboard Kazakhstan-domiciled merchants, and Kazakhstan-domiciled sub-merchants of a client are equally out of scope. The focus is deliberate: being exclusively cross-border keeps our regulatory position clean, our controls proportionate and our operational attention undivided.

Our platform operates against a 99.95 per cent uptime objective, with disaster recovery in a second Kazakhstani city. Formal service levels, including support response times and incident handling, are set out in your agreement.

CentaPay is the acquiring institution's direct client and single counterparty. We are a regulated payment facilitator: we contract with international clients, submit their transactions, and take responsibility for the commercial and compliance relationship with each of them. The institution faces one authorised, supervised entity rather than a long list of foreign merchants.

CentaPay does, contractually, for every transaction we submit. That liability is documented in our client agreements and reflected in our capital and risk framework.

Every sub-merchant receives its own individual merchant identifier. We do not pool, aggregate or blend identifiers under a single master, which means transaction activity is attributable at all times. Sub-merchants are subject to pre-approval and are restricted to pre-agreed business categories, and our prohibited and restricted category lists are published rather than internal.

Our programme is risk-based and proportionate to our model. It covers customer due diligence and enhanced due diligence for higher-risk relationships, automated sanctions, politically exposed person and adverse media screening at onboarding and on an ongoing basis, automated transaction monitoring with escalation to a dedicated Money Laundering Reporting Officer, reporting to the Financial Monitoring Agency where required, staff training, and board-level oversight. Our MLRO is based full-time in Astana and came to us from Kazakhstan's Financial Intelligence Unit.

Client money is held in segregated accounts in accordance with AFSA Client Money Rules, kept separate from our own operating funds, and reconciled daily.

Transaction data relating to Kazakhstan-issued payment instruments is stored in Kazakhstan in accordance with Law No. 94-V on Personal Data and Its Protection. Card data is handled within PCI DSS certified infrastructure, and our data protection obligations sit under the AIFC Data Protection Regulations.

Exclusively international, enterprise-grade volumes from vetted clients, in categories agreed with you in advance and with no domestic merchant acquiring on our side. Volume projections, corridor detail and commercial terms are shared under a mutual non-disclosure agreement rather than published here.