Imagine you are a newly appointed Head of Communications at a young exchange in a frontier market, with slightly more than one million domestic individual accounts at the CSD. A lot of tasks ahead, indeed. That was March 2023.
Astana International Exchange (AIX) was launched in November 2018 with the IPO of Kazatomprom, Kazakhstan’s national atomic company and a global leader in uranium production. The promising development path of the newly established exchange – operating on the Nasdaq trading platform, working within the framework of English law, and aiming to become the capital market driver in Central Asia – was soon interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. A post-pandemic revival began in 2022 with the IPO of another national champion, KazMunaiGas. The local IPO of this oil and gas flagship helped create buzz around the stock market and attract new retail investors.
In 2023, Polymetal, one of the world’s top 15 gold producers, redomiciled to Kazakhstan, to the Astana International Financial Centre, with AIX becoming a primary exchange for the company. Global custodians and investment banks followed the issuer – and so did Polymetal’s retail investors. One day, an elderly lady came to our office. She was a Polymetal investor from Switzerland. As we discovered during the conversation, she did not trust email correspondence, so when she received a notice from AIX Registrar requesting additional documents, she was hesitant to send them electronically and decided to come to Astana instead. Besides, she wanted to see with her own eyes where the new exchange was located and to visit Polymetal’s office there. After all, it was a good reason to travel to Central Asia. We recorded an interview with that lady, who turned out to be an experienced investor with a solid portfolio. That was the moment when the idea of featuring individual investors’ stories came to mind, and soon enough we launched the “I’m an Investor” project on our social media.
“I’m an Investor” is a series of interviews with individual investors. They talk about their investment journeys, their most profitable and losing trades, strategies, current portfolios, share insights about securities, and offer recommendations or forecasts. The main idea of the project is to let the audience look at somebody else’s portfolio and draw conclusions based on the speaker’s experience.
Initially, we wanted to interview investors from different backgrounds. Our target speakers were doctors, engineers, teachers, journalists, policemen – all those who manage to invest a portion of their income in the stock market. However, due to the relatively small investor base in our market, this became our biggest challenge. It is hard to find an average public servant who consistently invests in securities and has a story to share. As a result, most of our speakers over the past two years since the project’s launch have been somehow related to the capital market. There were analysts, financial coaches and fund managers. We truly value the stories of ordinary investors without a background in finance, but to be honest, they are rare. I think the fact that most of our guests are professionals reflects the level of maturity of Kazakhstan’s stock market.
“I’m an Investor” provides an additional source of information for those who cannot afford to buy investment courses and instead try to self-educate by reading books, watching videos or attending events from different financial institutions. Our goal is to deliver a message to ordinary Kazakhstani people: personal finances must be managed wisely, and investing in securities is a key part of that management.
Apart from supporting beginners, the project also helps us engage with renowned finfluencers, build our corporate brand and raise advocates across different economic sectors. The turning point came when potential speakers themselves began approaching our team, eager to participate. This is a clear sign that we are on the right track.
AIX Today: An Innovative Marketplace
Today, AIX is no longer a newcomer. It has evolved into a truly innovative marketplace powered by world-class infrastructure providers such as the Nasdaq Matching Engine, Amazon Web Services, SWIFT and Avenir. The exchange is directly connected to Euroclear, with 10 global custodians maintaining sub-accounts with AIX CSD via Citibank Kazakhstan.
Our ecosystem now brings together more than 180 issuers and nearly 60 trading members spanning Europe, China, the Gulf and CIS countries – with almost half of our equity issuers and trading members representing international companies. In 2024, AIX became the first exchange in the region to enable cross-exchange trading with Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange through the Tabadul Hub. Most recently, we welcomed the dual listing of a Hong Kong mining company on both AIX and HKEX.
Beyond that, AIX has consistently pioneered “firsts” in the local market: fractional trading of the National Bank’s gold coins, acting as a branch registrar for a foreign issuer, launching the country’s debut spot Bitcoin ETF, enabling ETN trading via a mobile app, introducing conditional trading and more.
Driving Growth Through Communications
We are an ambitious and fast-growing international exchange that fuels the development of Kazakhstan’s capital market. The Communications team plays a key role in strengthening AIX’s visibility and market penetration, ensuring that our messages reach and resonate with diverse stakeholders.
While AIX, as a financial institution, is focused on building a sustainable and enabling environment for investors to succeed, the Communications team channels its passion and creativity into supporting this trajectory. Through impactful projects such as “I’m an Investor”, the team contributes to promoting financial literacy, nurturing investor confidence and amplifying AIX’s role as a trusted marketplace.
We look forward to the day when it becomes natural for every Kazakhstani to set aside and invest a part of their income. After all, this is the very goal that drives our work.