Seventy-Three Times a Month
Seventy-three. That is the number of transactions the average active user of Kaspi.kz conducts each month — more than two per day, every day, more than the average North American PayPal user generates in an entire year. In a landlocked country of 20 million people wedged between Russia and China, a country best known internationally as the butt of a Sacha Baron Cohen joke and the source of 43% of the world's uranium, a single mobile application has achieved a depth of economic penetration that no Western super-app has managed to replicate. Seventy-five percent of Kazakhstan's population uses Kaspi. Seventy percent of those users open the app daily — a daily active ratio that would make Instagram's product team wince with envy. The platform processes more than 10 billion transactions annually, four times the combined volume of Visa and Mastercard in the country. In FY 2024, this machine generated nearly $5 billion in revenue and roughly $2 billion in net income, at margins that make most SaaS companies look like they're running charities.
The American equivalent, as CEO Mikheil Lomtadze likes to say, would be merging PayPal, Amazon, Capital One, Booking.com, and Instacart into a single application — then getting three-quarters of the United States to use it. Except that comparison undersells the structural achievement. None of those American companies has eliminated the others. Kaspi didn't just build a super-app; it became the financial operating system of an entire nation. The paradox at the center of this story is that the world's most successful super-app was not built in Shenzhen or Silicon Valley or Singapore. It was built in Almaty, by a Georgian MBA and a Kazakh entrepreneur, on the chassis of a failing commercial bank, in a post-Soviet economy that barely had internet banking when they started.
By the Numbers
The Kaspi Machine
~$5BFY 2024 revenue (KZT ~2.4 trillion)
~$2BFY 2024 net income
15M+Monthly active consumers
75%Kazakhstan population penetration
73Monthly transactions per active consumer
10B+Annual transactions processed
~68%Return on equity (FY 2023)
$92Nasdaq IPO price per ADS (Jan 2024)
The Steppe, the State, and the Void
To understand what Kaspi built, you must first understand what it replaced — which is to say, almost nothing.
Kazakhstan declared independence from the Soviet Union on December 16, 1991, the very last Soviet republic to do so, as if reluctant to leave a system it had never chosen to join. The country inherited a command economy, a cratered banking infrastructure, and a population scattered across a landmass the size of Western Europe with the population density of Montana. For three decades under Nursultan Nazarbayev — a former Communist politburo member who ruled with the quiet authoritarianism of a man who understood that stability was the product Central Asia's neighbors were least likely to export — Kazakhstan pursued resource-driven modernization. Oil revenues poured in. A brand-new capital city, Astana (later renamed Nur-Sultan, then renamed back to Astana), rose from the frozen steppe like a geopolitical vanity project. Foreign direct investment accumulated to $370 billion cumulative since independence.
But the wealth trickled down unevenly, and the digital infrastructure barely trickled at all. As late as 2014, electronic payments accounted for just 13% of all transactions in Kazakhstan. The average income remained below $10,000. Traditional banks served corporations and the urban elite; the mass retail market was an afterthought. Credit cards were a novelty. E-commerce was nascent. The country had smartphones but few reasons to use them for anything financial.
This was the void into which Kaspi would expand — not the void of a failed state, but the void of an economy that had modernized its physical infrastructure while leaving its digital plumbing almost entirely unbuilt. The absence of legacy systems, which in developed markets creates inertia, in Kazakhstan created the opposite: an entire economy waiting to leapfrog.
The Georgian, the Kazakh, and the Private Equity Fund
The origin story of Kaspi.kz is not a garage tale. It is a private equity restructuring that mutated, over seventeen years, into something its architects never intended.
In 2002, Vyacheslav Kim — a Kazakh entrepreneur with interests spanning retail and commerce — acquired a small, unremarkable bank called Kaspiyskiy, based in Almaty. The bank served corporations and small businesses. It was not special. Kim saw a possibility that the bank's existing management did not: consumer finance and retail banking, integrated with his commercial operations, could create something stickier than either alone.
In 2006, Baring Vostok Capital Partners, Moscow's most prominent private equity fund — led by the American investor Michael Calvey — acquired a majority stake in the bank. Among Baring Vostok's partners was a 32-year-old Georgian named Mikheil Lomtadze. Born in Georgia (the country, not the U.S. state) to a family that, as he tells it, prioritized education even when meals were uncertain, Lomtadze had founded a strategic consulting firm in Tbilisi that grew large enough to be absorbed into the Ernst & Young network. He earned his MBA from Harvard Business School in 2002, talked his way into Baring Vostok by offering to work for free, made partner within a year by evaluating businesses across the former Soviet Union, and by 2006 was the firm's point person on the Kaspi investment.
In 2007, at age 33, Lomtadze left Baring Vostok to become Kaspi's CEO. He was not a banker. None of the team he assembled were career bankers. That was the point.
When I stepped in to run the company that would become Kaspi.kz in 2007, it was a bank with no online presence that had been struggling to survive amid a global financial crisis.
Lomtadze's first move was counterintuitive and violent in its simplicity: he exited commercial lending entirely and pivoted to retail banking. He fired the existing product lines. He killed a credit card product that had over a million users because customer satisfaction was low. He started hiring engineers and product designers instead of loan officers. The bank that had served corporations would now serve people — and it would serve them not through branch networks and paper forms, but through technology. This was 2008, the year global financial markets collapsed and Kazakhstan's banking sector cratered. Five of the country's largest banks required state bailouts. Kaspi survived because it had just shed the commercial loan book that was killing its peers.
The founding management team — Lomtadze (CEO), Pavel Mironov (COO, an IT engineer from Russia), Yuri Didenko (Capital Markets, formerly of Baring Vostok), and Tengiz Mosidze (CFO, an Ernst & Young veteran from Georgia) — would stay intact for the next seventeen years. All four would later attend Harvard Business School executive programs. The team's stability, and its combination of private equity discipline, technology fluency, and outsider ambition, would prove to be Kaspi's most durable competitive advantage.
The Architecture of a Super-App Nobody Asked For
Kaspi did not begin as a super-app. It began as a retail bank that happened to be run by people who thought like product engineers.
Kaspi's product evolution, 2008–2024
2008Pivots from commercial to retail banking; launches mass-market consumer lending.
2012Introduces e-Wallet and bill payments — Kaspi's first digital payment product.
2014Launches Marketplace platform and Kaspi Bonus loyalty program; online consumer finance goes live.
2015Kaspi Gold debit card debuts — the on-ramp to the digital ecosystem.
2017Kaspi.kz Super App launches, unifying payments, marketplace, and fintech in a single mobile interface. P2P transfers go live.
2018QR payments, face-recognition ATMs, Kaspi Business merchant app launched.
2019Mobile commerce and QR payment terminals deployed at merchant scale.
The sequence matters more than it appears to. Each layer was not merely additive — it was architecturally dependent on the one before it.
Bill payments in 2012 created the habit of using Kaspi for recurring transactions. The Marketplace in 2014 gave consumers a reason to keep money inside the ecosystem. Consumer finance — instant credit approval at the point of purchase — collapsed the friction between browsing and buying. The Kaspi Gold card in 2015 was the physical bridge: a debit card that was also the key to the digital kingdom, distributed aggressively and for free. By the time the Super App launched in 2017, consolidating all these services into a single mobile interface, it was not introducing new behavior. It was formalizing behavior that already existed.
Marketing experts told Lomtadze that consumers wouldn't want to hold savings accounts with the same brand they used to buy kitchen appliances. IT experts said different online activities demanded different interfaces. He ignored both. "Was it best for customers to download multiple apps and deal with numerous passwords and log-ins?" he wrote in Harvard Business Review in 2025. "Or to get everything they need to manage their lives in one place? The answer was clear."
What made Kaspi's super-app different from its Chinese antecedents — WeChat, Alipay — was the starting point. WeChat started from messaging. Alipay started from e-commerce payments. Kaspi started from banking. It began with the customer's money, which meant it began with trust and identity, and then expanded outward into commerce and daily life. The bank wasn't a legacy liability; it was the foundation that made everything else credible.
The Flywheel No One Could See from London
By 2019, Kaspi had built something that was, by every internal metric, extraordinary. Eight million monthly active users. The dominant player in online payments, consumer lending, and e-commerce in Kazakhstan. Revenue per user exceeding $220 — higher than Google's or Facebook's. Profit margins that would be considered exceptional in any sector, in any market.
None of this mattered to international capital markets.
Kaspi's first attempt at an IPO, in late 2019 on the London Stock Exchange, failed. The company sought a $4 billion valuation.
Potential buyers, confronting a company they had never heard of, from a country they could not place on a map, governed by an autocrat who had just performatively resigned, passed. The deal was pulled.
If tech companies can do financial services, who said that financial services cannot do tech?
Then COVID-19 happened. And for Kaspi, the pandemic was a particle accelerator. Stuck indoors, Kazakh consumers who had been partially digital went fully digital. Mobile app usage surged 72%. Net income jumped 50% in the first half of 2020 alone. In October 2020, Kaspi returned to London and priced its IPO at $33.75 per GDR — the top of the indicative range — implying a $6.5 billion valuation. The stock opened at $38 and traded as high as $46.90 on its first day, with trading volume exceeding that of Russia's Yandex. It was the LSE's second-largest listing of the year, the largest IPO ever out of Kazakhstan, and the first Kazakh bank to sell shares in London since Alliance Bank in 2007 — a bank that subsequently required a state bailout.
The 2019 failure and the 2020 success taught Kaspi's management a lesson that would shape its capital markets strategy for the next four years: timing was not just important, it was the product. The Harvard Business School case study published that same year, Kaspi.kz IPO, makes the point explicit: "even a short delay of six months could potentially add millions of dollars to its value." The case, written by Victoria Ivashina, became one of HBS's most-taught cases on IPO preparation in emerging markets.
The NPS Obsession
The internal culture of Kaspi can be reduced to a single metric: Net Promoter Score.
Most technology companies measure NPS. Kaspi is governed by it. Approximately 300,000 users are surveyed monthly. Most managers at Kaspi do not have financial targets as part of their quarterly or annual objectives. Instead, they are measured on NPS — the customer satisfaction score for the specific product they oversee. Revenue is treated as a consequence, not a goal.
This is not Silicon Valley affectation. In a market where the entire user base is 15 million people, every dissatisfied customer is statistically material. There is no reservoir of untapped users to replace the ones you lose. The only growth strategy that works in a saturated market is deepening engagement with existing users — getting each person to transact more frequently, across more categories, with higher trust. NPS is the leading indicator of that deepening.
Kaspi's organizational architecture reinforces this. Small, dedicated product teams, each led by a "directly responsible individual," manage every aspect of their product — development, launch, iteration. The structure is deliberately startup-like: accountability is personal, ownership is total, bureaucratic layers are minimal. Any employee can suggest a new product or feature, but the company develops only those ideas with the highest potential to improve everyday customer experience. Proposals that are technically impressive but customer-irrelevant die early.
The results are visible in Kaspi's engagement metrics. The 65% daily-active-to-monthly-active ratio is second only to WeChat globally. The 73 monthly transactions per active user implies the app is not a utility used once a week — it is a reflex. Bill payments, P2P transfers, marketplace purchases, loan management, government services: the app has absorbed so many daily rituals that using it is not a choice but an ambient condition.
Kaspi's NPS, reported at 87%, has been climbing steadily from roughly 40% several years ago. The improvement is not accidental. It is the compound interest of killing products that don't delight, iterating on the ones that do, and measuring the result with the obsessiveness of a clinical trial.
The Bank Run That Made Kaspi Invincible
In 2014, a crisis arrived that would have destroyed a lesser company and instead made Kaspi nearly indestructible.
Misinformation — a rumor, likely originating on social media — triggered a bank run on Kaspi. Depositors lined up to withdraw their money. The details were straightforward panic: whispers that the bank was insolvent, that deposits were at risk, that Kaspi would be the next Kazakh bank to fail. None of it was true, but in a country where five major banks had required state bailouts within living memory, the emotional logic was airtight.
Lomtadze responded with radical transparency. The details of Kaspi's response are the subject of a separate HBS case study — Kaspi.kz (B): The 2014 Run on the Bank — but the strategic consequence was profound. Kaspi did not merely survive the bank run; it learned from it that trust was its most critical infrastructure, more important than technology, more important than product features, more important than pricing. Every subsequent product decision was filtered through this lens: would this make customers trust us more, or less?
The 2014 crisis also catalyzed Kaspi's pivot toward becoming a technology platform rather than remaining a bank. A bank is inherently fragile — subject to maturity mismatch, confidence crises, and liquidity runs. A payments and marketplace platform is inherently resilient — revenue is fee-based, not interest-rate dependent, and the business model does not require holding deposits against loans. By building out payments and marketplace as its primary growth engines, Kaspi was deliberately reducing the structural fragility that had nearly killed it.
By FY 2024, the Payments and Marketplace platforms together accounted for 69% of Kaspi's consolidated net income, up from 66% in FY 2023 and far higher than a few years earlier. The fintech (lending) business still generates substantial revenue, but it is the slower-growing, lower-multiple piece of a company that has systematically migrated its earnings toward asset-light, fee-based models. The bank run of 2014 planted the seed; a decade of deliberate architectural choices grew the tree.
Seventy Percent of Kazakhstan's GDP Passes Through This App
The payments business is Kaspi's foundation — not in the sense of its largest revenue contributor (that remains Fintech), but in the sense that it is the substrate upon which everything else is built. Every time money moves through the Kaspi ecosystem, the company earns a small transaction fee. In 3Q 2025, Payments Total Payment Value reached KZT 11,615 billion (~$23 billion), up 18% year-over-year, with transactions growing 14% YoY.
The math of the payments business is brutally simple and nearly impossible to replicate. Once you process the majority of a country's digital transactions, the marginal cost of the next transaction approaches zero — what Kaspi's management calls "operational gearing." Revenue and net income grow faster than volume because infrastructure costs are largely fixed. In 9M 2025, Payments revenue grew 14% YoY while Payments net income grew 17% YoY — the operational leverage manifesting in real time.
By 2022, Kaspi processed more transactions than Mastercard and Visa combined in Kazakhstan. The QR payment system — Kaspi QR, where a merchant scans a customer's personal QR code and the customer selects a payment method — has effectively replaced card networks in much of daily commerce. Roughly 737,000 active merchants use the Kaspi Pay Super App to accept payments, manage inventory, advertise products, take out small business loans, and ship through Kaspi's delivery network. The merchant-side super-app is as critical as the consumer-side one: it locks in the supply side of the marketplace, creating a two-sided network effect that compounds with each additional participant.
The payments infrastructure also generates the data that fuels everything else. Every QR scan, every bill payment, every P2P transfer creates a data point. That data feeds the lending engine (credit scoring), the marketplace (product recommendations, ad targeting), and the merchant tools (business analytics). Payments is not Kaspi's most profitable segment. It is Kaspi's most strategic one.
The Marketplace That Eats Kazakhstan
Kaspi's Marketplace platform is its fastest-growing business and the most direct expression of the super-app thesis: if you already own the payments rails and the consumer's financial identity, you can insert yourself between every buyer and seller in the country.
In FY 2024, Marketplace GMV grew 44% year-over-year. E-Commerce GMV — the core category — grew 85%. Revenue grew 64% YoY and net income 41%. The e-Commerce Take Rate (Kaspi's cut of each transaction) reached 11.3%, up 30 basis points year-over-year. These are extraordinary growth rates for what is already the dominant e-commerce platform in a country where digital commerce penetration remains low by global standards.
The marketplace model stacks multiple revenue layers on top of each transaction: the base take rate, delivery fees (Kaspi Delivery orders grew 128% YoY in FY 2024, reaching 99 million), advertising revenue (value-added services grew 4.2x YoY in 2Q 2024, adding 100 basis points to the Marketplace Take Rate), and logistics services. Kaspi Postomats — parcel lockers — accounted for more than 50% of e-Commerce deliveries by the end of 2024, driving down last-mile costs and improving unit economics with every new installation.
The company has methodically expanded the Marketplace into adjacent verticals. In 2023, Kaspi acquired a 40% stake (with 51% voting control) in Kolesa Group — Kazakhstan's leading online classifieds operator, owning the top automotive portal (Kolesa.kz), the top real estate vertical (Krisha.kz), and the generalist marketplace Market.kz — for KZT 39 billion (~$88.5 million). By FY 2024, e-Cars (built on Kolesa's automotive inventory) accounted for a significant share of e-Commerce GMV, with e-Cars GMV increasing 62% from Q1 to Q4 2024.
Kaspi Travel — launched initially as a flight and rail booking platform — grew GMV 34% YoY in FY 2024, with the Kaspi Tours vacation package marketplace (launched in 2023) achieving an 8.1% Take Rate and GMV growth measured in the hundreds of percent. Kaspi e-Grocery, launched via dark stores in Almaty and expanded to Astana and Shymkent (collectively covering roughly half of Kazakhstan's total retail trade), grew GMV 97% YoY in FY 2024 with 858,000 active consumers.
Each new vertical follows the same playbook: use the existing super-app distribution to launch at near-zero customer acquisition cost, integrate with the payments infrastructure to ensure seamless checkout, layer on consumer finance (BNPL, installment plans) to boost conversion rates, and then gradually build out the proprietary logistics and advertising tools that transform a marketplace into a high-margin platform.
The Lending Engine Hidden Inside the Super-App
Kaspi's Fintech platform — consumer lending, deposits, buy-now-pay-later, merchant and micro-business finance — is the business that most closely resembles a traditional bank. It is also the business that allows the rest of the ecosystem to exist.
In FY 2024, Total Finance Value grew 34% YoY. Revenue grew 43% and net income grew 32%. But Fintech's share of total net income has been deliberately shrinking — from 34% in FY 2023 to 31% in FY 2024 — not because it is declining, but because Payments and Marketplace are growing faster and are more strategically valuable. The management team views this migration explicitly: they report the share of non-fintech earnings in nearly every quarterly filing, tracking it upward with evident satisfaction.
The lending business benefits from information advantages that no standalone bank can match. Every Kaspi user's transaction history — how often they pay bills, where they shop, how much they earn (visible through deposit inflows), whether they repay P2P loans on time — feeds a proprietary credit scoring engine. Kaspi can underwrite a consumer loan or BNPL purchase in seconds, at the point of sale, with a risk model calibrated by billions of behavioral data points. The cost of customer acquisition is effectively zero, since the borrower is already an active Kaspi user. And the integration of lending into the shopping experience — buy an appliance on the Marketplace, finance it instantly through the Fintech platform — creates conversion rates that standalone lenders cannot touch.
Merchant & Micro Business Finance, Kaspi's fastest-growing lending product, reached 17% of Total Finance Value in 9M 2024. The product serves the same merchants who use Kaspi Pay to accept payments and sell on the Marketplace — closing the loop between commerce and credit in a way that makes each side of the platform stickier.
The fintech business does introduce structural risks — credit risk, interest rate sensitivity, regulatory exposure — that pure-play technology companies avoid. Kaspi funds its loan book partly through customer deposits, which introduces the same maturity mismatch that defines traditional banking. Kazakhstan's regulator has been watching. Bloomberg Law reported in late 2024 that the Kazakh financial watchdog had grown concerned about the country's buy-now-pay-later market — specifically, about inflation pressures and a growing consumer debt burden from installment plans that, for the paying customer, often offer no upfront discount.
This is the fundamental tension at the heart of Kaspi's model: the fintech business fuels the marketplace business, but it also exposes the company to regulatory and credit cycle risks that its competitors — Russian marketplaces Ozon and Wildberries, operating in Kazakhstan without lending arms — do not face.
To Nasdaq, and Then to Istanbul
On January 19, 2024, Kaspi.kz became the first Kazakh company to list on the Nasdaq. The selling shareholders — Kim, Lomtadze, and Asia Equity Partners — sold 11.3 million ADSs at $92 per share, raising approximately $1 billion in an upsized offering. Morgan Stanley,
J.P. Morgan, and Citigroup acted as lead bookrunners. The company received none of the proceeds; this was a secondary sale, a liquidity event for founders and early investors.
The Nasdaq listing served a strategic purpose beyond capital markets prestige. The London Stock Exchange listing, completed in 2020, had suffered from chronically low trading volume; Kaspi voluntarily delisted from the LSE in March 2024. The U.S. listing provided access to a deeper pool of institutional capital, higher daily trading volume, and the credibility of a Nasdaq ticker for international expansion ambitions.
Those ambitions crystallized in late 2024 when Kaspi announced the acquisition of a controlling stake in Hepsiburada (D-MARKET Electronic Services & Trading), Turkey's leading e-commerce platform. The deal, closing in January 2025 for approximately $1.127 billion, gave Kaspi 65.41% ownership (later increased to 66.35% by July 2025). The strategic logic was seductive: Turkey has a population of 85 million — more than four times Kazakhstan's — with an underpenetrated and fast-growing e-commerce market. Hepsiburada had already built its own payments arm (HepsiPay) and possessed the cultural DNA — innovative, consumer-obsessed, focused on sustainable growth — that Kaspi believed was a prerequisite for integration.
For a long time, we have said investing in our growth including international expansion is our top priority. With the acquisition of a controlling stake in Hepsiburada, we expand our market to 100 million people.
The Hepsiburada acquisition represented a categorical bet: that Kaspi's playbook — super-app integration of payments, marketplace, and fintech — could be exported to a fundamentally different market with different regulatory structures, different payment habits, and different competitive dynamics. In the first nine months of 2025 post-acquisition, Hepsiburada contributed KZT 729 billion in revenue but a net loss of KZT 34 billion to the Kaspi group. The Turkish business was not yet profitable.
To fund the expansion, Kaspi paused its dividend — a meaningful signal from a company that had historically returned more than half its earnings to shareholders even while growing at 40-50% annually. The dividend yield of approximately 5%, which had attracted income investors to a growth story, was sacrificed on the altar of international ambition. Some investors were confused. The stock, which had traded near $140 per ADS in early 2024, fell sharply, dipping below $80 by mid-2025.
The January That Almost Broke Kazakhstan
Any analysis of Kaspi that ignores political risk is an analysis of a different company.
On January 2, 2022, protests erupted in the western Kazakh town of Zhanaozen — an oil hub, and the site of deadly clashes between protesters and police just over a decade earlier — against the government's decision to lift price caps on liquefied petroleum gas, which most Kazakhs use as car fuel. The price roughly doubled overnight. Within days, demonstrations spread across the country, encompassing broader grievances against the Nazarbayev-era ruling elite, corruption, and wealth inequality. Protesters in Almaty stormed government buildings. A statue of Nazarbayev was pulled down. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, Nazarbayev's handpicked successor, invited Russian-led CSTO troops into the country and authorized security forces to "shoot without warning." By the time the unrest subsided, at least 44 people were officially dead (the real number was likely higher), more than 8,000 detained, and Nazarbayev had been stripped of his position as Security Council head.
The internet was shut down nationwide from January 5 to January 10. For five days, Kaspi — the financial operating system of the country — was effectively inoperable. People could not pay for food. Cards did not work. Cash could not be withdrawn. The shutdown demonstrated, with terrible clarity, both Kaspi's indispensability and its vulnerability. The platform that had become economic infrastructure was also dependent on state-controlled telecommunications infrastructure. The government that had enabled Kazakhstan's digital transformation could, with a phone call to Kazakhtelecom, switch it off.
For Kaspi investors, the January 2022 crisis was a visceral reminder that the company's most profound competitive advantage — its monopolistic integration into daily Kazakh life — was also a form of dependence on a political system that remained authoritarian, opaque, and capable of violence.
The Price of Being Everything
Kaspi trades at a valuation that, on paper, defies financial logic. As of mid-2025, the stock hovered around 6-10x earnings — a multiple typically assigned to declining businesses or companies facing existential threats, not a platform growing revenue at 20-32% annually with 40%+ net income margins and 68% return on equity. The market is not ignorant of Kaspi's financial quality. It is pricing the risks that surround it.
Those risks are layered and interdependent. Country risk: Kazakhstan is an autocracy with close ties to both Russia and China, in a region where geopolitical stability is not guaranteed. Regulatory risk: the Kazakh financial watchdog has begun scrutinizing BNPL pricing and consumer lending practices; tighter regulation could compress the fintech margin engine. Concentration risk: 75% of Kazakhstan's population already uses the app, leaving limited room for user growth in the domestic market. Execution risk: the Hepsiburada acquisition takes Kaspi into a $900 billion
GDP market with different competitive dynamics (Turkish e-commerce is contested by Trendyol, backed by Alibaba) and chronic macroeconomic volatility. Currency risk: the Kazakh tenge is a petrocurrency, correlated with oil prices, and Kaspi reports in tenge while trading in dollars on Nasdaq.
The bear case is not that Kaspi will stop growing. It is that the risks are unhedgeable and the market, which has spent decades learning that emerging-market super-apps can lose 90% of their value on a regulatory caprice or a political crisis, is rationally refusing to pay a Western multiple for a Central Asian company, regardless of how extraordinary its execution may be.
The bull case is that the market is suffering from a failure of imagination — that it cannot process a company with software margins, platform economics, and infrastructure-level penetration trading at a hardware multiple, simply because the company's address is 154A Nauryzbai Batyr Street, Almaty.
Seventy-Three
In November 2025, Kaspi announced a new payments innovation: Kaspi Alaqan — pay-by-palm. A biometric payment system where consumers authenticate purchases with a hand scan. No phone. No card. No QR code. Just flesh and data.
It is a small product announcement, easily lost in an earnings release. But it captures something essential about Kaspi's trajectory — the relentless compression of friction between a person and a transaction, the steady absorption of more daily rituals into a single platform, the incremental deepening of an engagement metric that is already the highest of any technology company in its home market.
Seventy-three transactions a month. And the hand that makes them just became the payment device.
