Frequently asked questions

CentaPay will operate as a regulated payment facilitator built for cross-border trade into Central Asia. We will 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.

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

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.

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

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

No. We will 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.

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

We will serve most legitimate digital commerce, with a defined list of categories we will not accept and a further list we will 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.

Yes. Under our payment facilitator model, a licensed payment service provider can bring its own merchant portfolio to us. Each sub-merchant will receive its own individual merchant identifier - we will not pool, aggregate or blend identifiers - so transaction reporting stays transparent at the sub-merchant level for you, for us and for our local acquiring partners. Each sub-merchant will be 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.

You will 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 will be available from Sep 2026 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.

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 We do not publish a rate card, because a number set without those variables would be meaningless.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

We aim for settlement on a T+1 basis. Actual timing depends on the payment method, local partner 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.

Our platform will operate 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 Ltd is incorporated in the Astana International Financial Centre with Business Identification Number 260740900699. CentaPay is completing its final authorisation work with the Astana Financial Services Authority. We are not yet accepting clients or processing transactions. Services will be available from Q4 2026. Our status is a matter of public record and can be verified directly on the AFSA public register.

Our client and partner agreements will be 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.

CentaPay and its clients will be liable for all chargebacks.

Every sub-merchant will receive its own individual merchant identifier. We will not pool, aggregate or blend identifiers under a single master, which means transaction activity is attributable at all times. Sub-merchants will be subject to pre-approval and will be 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 will be 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 will be stored in Kazakhstan in accordance with Law No. 94-V on Personal Data and Its Protection. Card data will be handled within PCI DSS certified infrastructure, and our data protection obligations sit under the AIFC Data Protection Regulations.

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.