BNK Commercial Bank — formerly the microfinance organization BNK Finance Kazakhstan and recently transformed into a bank — has received a written directive from Kazakhstan’s Agency for Regulation and Development of the Financial Market (ARDFM) for violating prudential ratios, the agency reported.
The former MFO received its banking license on June 25, 2025, and managed to operate without regulatory notices for about two months.
The ARDFM noted on its website that the bank was sanctioned for violating prudential liquidity coverage and net stable funding ratios, as well as the term liquidity ratio (k4-1), as of July 1, 2025.
The term liquidity ratio (k4-1) is calculated as the ratio of the monthly average amount of highly liquid assets to the monthly average amount of term liabilities with a maturity of up to and including seven days.
The acceptable minimum ratio is 1, meaning the bank’s highly liquid assets must be at least equal to its term liabilities.
Kazakhstan’s National Bank included BNK in its banking statistics as of July 1, 2025. The South Korean institution ranked last in terms of assets, with 27.5 billion tenge (approximately $51 million), which is 12.7% less than Zaman Bank — an Islamic bank — in second-to-last place.
The bank’s sole shareholder is BNK Capital Co., headquartered in Busan, which is part of South Korea’s largest holding, BNK Financial Group Inc.
