Via Forbes, a report on Kazakhstan’s planned finance center:

Kassym-Jomart Tokayev is the new president of Kazakhstan, and the country’s signature financial event, Astana Finance Days (AFD), is supposed to highlight this man’s vision of making this place a freer market than it was even a year ago.

Last year, the four-day AFD brought in 4,500 attendees for the Astana International Financial Center’s (AIFC) opening salvo into the financial events market place. It was their first year running one and the last year in power for Soviet-era leader Nursultan Nazarbayev.

This year, Tokayev’s first few months in power, some 3,500 people attended from 65 countries. They opened new offices. But the real showcase for 2019 was that the AIFC, located in the buildings surrounded what looks like the futuristic Spaceship Earth at Disney’s Epcot, was their new English law court. This is what will govern securities transactions and corporate law at the AIFC. The Chief Justice of the AIFC Court is a retired British judge and a British lord, Harry Kenneth Woolf. The Chair of the Arbitration Court is another Brit, Barbara Dohmann. The turnout was smaller because of that particular focus, event planners said.

The AIFC is now officially a city within a city; a city of just over a million inhabitants that, as of last year, was renamed as an ode to Nazarbayev. It’s now called Nur-Sultan, even though the AIFC keeps the old city’s name.

The AIFC may be Nazarbayev’s brainchild. But it is the nervous system of a new Kazakhstan, trying to become the leader in a region of the world known from a market perspective as having lots of open space and raw materials, but very little else.

For Kazakhstan to modernize and become an integral business and financial partner for companies doing business along China’s new Belt and Road Initiative, the AIFC has to be in demand and serve a purpose. For now, it looks out of this world, maybe like a planet still in formation.

It’s roughly 9-month-old Astana International Exchange has to have more than a handful of thinly traded equity listed there. It also needs to figure out how it will tie in with the already existing Kazakhstan Stock Exchange in Almaty, best known by its acronym KASE.

If Kazakhstan is to be a serious powerhouse in Central Asia, at the crossroads of China and the West, then AIFC has to be a success. Almost everything is riding on it.

“If the AIFC wants to grow its new securities exchange, they will need to attract more items to list,” says Zachary Witlin, the resident expert on Central Asian economies for the Eurasia Group in Washington. “The AIFC is making bold promises but I don’t think the privatizations by themselves will be enough to make it a success. I’m not dismissing the Astana International Exchange entirely, I’m just waiting to be convinced that it has a strong financial case to make.”

For now, the Chinese companies, in particular, have been perfectly happy to work through banks or other local partners directly instead of issuing credit or equity on the AIX.

Last year, the country’s state-owned uranium miner, Kazatomprom, listed some of its shares on the AIX and in London. Russian mining company Polymetal did the same this year, listing on the LSE and the AIX. AIFC says they are working on more cross-listings like this.

Everyone from corporate investment banks to fund managers in emerging and frontier markets is waiting to see what happens with the planned privatization of KazMunayGas, the state-run oil and natural gas giant.

“The Kazakh government has to make good on their privatization program. They’ve announced this for years and the market is waiting for it,” says Christophe Charlier, chairman for Renaissance Capital, an emerging and frontier markets investment bank specialist with main offices in London and Moscow.

Charlier was one of the speakers at the event, and RenCap became a registered member of the Astana International Exchange as a broker/dealer. So far they have no plans on renting space within the AIFC.

“The thing about the new exchange in the AIFC is that they are really competing with Moscow, where there is a lot more liquidity. And London,” says Charlier. “So the big companies need to be convinced for listing there.”

The exchange is not without backers.

Their partners include Nasdaq—mostly on the tech side—and Goldman Sachs, the biggest U.S. investor in the AIFC, where the new exchange sits. Citi is the only U.S. bank with an operating license in Kazakhstan, and one of its largest foreign investors.

“There is, of course, competition to attract investor interest, but things like Astana Finance Days highlight the unique qualities of this platform and its advantages against other regional hot spots such as Singapore and Hong Kong, or Dubai and Moscow,” a spokesperson from the public affairs office of the AIFC said in a statement. In private, they will tell you that the AIFC and its Astana International Exchange cannot rely on privatization plans to grow.

Registering companies in the AIFC allows for specific tax waivers, including both corporate and individual income tax. Foreign companies work permit procedures are easier to set up there than outside of the Center.

On July 3, the third day of AFD, Spanish newswire EFE was the first to state how much was riding on the AIFC.

That puts a lot on the shoulders of AIFC governor Kairat Kelimbetov. He says the AIFC is targeting three markets to set up shop in the Center or list on the exchange. That includes the fledgling Eurasian Economic Market, Central Asia, and most important of all, the financial services related to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

“In the past 12 months we have registered more than 200 companies, most notably the China Development Bank and the China Construction Bank, and we are looking forward to becoming the financial hub for the Belt and Road in Central Asia,” Kelimbetov was quoted as saying by EFE.

They now have around 210 occupants.

Kelimbetov predicted that the next ten years would be key to the further development of the AIFC and of the entire Kazakh economy.

The chairman of the AIX Management Board, Timothy Bennett, a former CEO of the New Zealand Exchange said the Astana International Exchange was off to a slow start.

“It’s a three-to-five year journey. The country’s privatization program at the moment is insufficient to build a new market place,” he told EFE.

Despite that slow start, the AIFC shot up ten spots to rank first in Eastern Europe and Central Asia on the Global Financial Centers Index, and 51st worldwide.

“Astana only officially launched its financial center in 2018,” wrote the Index’s authors from Long Finance, a London-based financial markets research firm. “It is unusual for such a new center to perform so strongly.”

From a distance, the AIFC looks like the best of Kazakhstan.

Economic activity is expected to have be lackluster in the second quarter following a deceleration in the first quarter, according to the emerging market big-picture analysts at Focus Economics.

In May, the short-term economic activity indicator weakened for a second consecutive month, amid a drop in industrial production that was brought upon by a slowdown in manufacturing and the sharpest slump in oil output since 2016 due to maintenance of three key oil fields. The industrial downturn, coupled with lower oil prices, is likely to have hurt exports in May, which had barely recovered in April.

As a result, growth is expected to decelerate this year. If domestic demand proves resilient, thanks to a planned fiscal stimulus program supporting consumption, loose credit and fixed-asset investment, then the economy should do well this year and next.

FocusEconomics analysts expect GDP to increase 3.5% in 2019 and again in 2020. By comparison, another frontier market, Vietnam, is seen growing at more than 6%. Vietnam has nearly five times Kazakhstan’s population despite its much smaller size.

Foreign direct investment has fallen by around 11% to come in at $5.9 billion in the first quarter, but is above historical averages of $4.3 billion, according to Trading Economics, using data from the country’s central bank.

Lastly, the new exchange will need to make an all-out effort convincing other neighbors in the ex-Soviet ’Stans to join in. But if China and Russia continue to do so, and if Kazakhstan makes good on its decade-old promise to privatize assets, the hope is that it will eventually have a domestic investor base that gives the AIFC, and its newest exchange, a better chance at survival.