Industry

Figures converted from Kazakhstani tenge (KZT) at historical FX rates — see data/company.json.fx_rates and the company's own 20-F translations (FY2025 consolidated revenue ₸4,046B = $8,004M implies ~₸505.5/USD). Ratios, margins, and multiples are unitless and unchanged.

Industry — Fintech / Super-App

1. Industry in One Page

A fintech super-app is a single mobile application that bundles payments, e-commerce and consumer credit so a user pays bills, buys groceries, finances purchases, holds deposits and accesses government services without ever leaving the app. Money is made in three places at once: a take rate on payment volume, a take rate on third-party marketplace GMV, and a net interest margin on consumer loans funded by sticky in-app deposits. The model only works in markets where (a) card and bank-branch infrastructure is thin, (b) one app can win share of habit and become the default digital wallet, and (c) regulators allow the same group to hold a banking licence, a payments licence and an e-commerce business under one roof. Cycles hit through interest rates (fintech NIM and cost of risk), consumer real income (marketplace GMV) and reserve/tax rules (regulator margin). Newcomers usually misunderstand that this is not a "tech multiple" business — the gravity-well is a local bank balance sheet wrapped in a consumer app, and once entrenched it produces utility-like share with software-like margins.

Read: a super-app is a two-sided platform glued to a bank charter. Take the bank away and the moat is a marketing budget; take the consumer app away and the bank is a regional lender on a 4–6x earnings multiple.

2. How This Industry Makes Money

The revenue engine is three independent income streams that share one cost base. Each has its own pricing unit and its own margin profile.

Where bargaining power sits. Consumers have low power once habit forms — a super-app you open dozens of times a day becomes the bank account, not the other way round. Merchants face the strongest counterparty: take rates are visibly cheaper than card schemes (QR vs Visa/Mastercard interchange) but the platform owns the demand, so the merchant relationship is asymmetric. Regulators hold the real veto, because consumer lending caps, reserve requirements, deposit-insurance rules and payment licensing can move the margin on the lending book by hundreds of basis points in a single ruling.

Capital intensity. Two layers. The technology layer is asset-light — proprietary code, biometric ID, a few data centres. The fintech layer is balance-sheet-heavy: a TFV of $23.1B at year-end FY2025 sits on top of a deposit book that funds it, and equity has to absorb credit losses. The valuation question is whether to treat the consolidated entity as a tech platform or as a bank-with-an-app. The market often defaults to the bank multiple, which is why super-apps tend to trade at a structural discount to pure-platform peers.

3. Demand, Supply, and the Cycle

Demand and supply move on different clocks for each of the three platforms. Understanding which clock is ticking is the key to reading any quarter.

The Kazakhstan-specific cycle in 2025 was a textbook fintech-margin squeeze: the National Bank of Kazakhstan raised the base rate from 15.25% to 18.00% effective December 1, 2025, deposit funding cost rose ~220 bps year-on-year, and Fintech segment net income growth slowed to 9% even as TFV grew 13%. The Payments and Marketplace platforms — which are not interest-rate sensitive — continued to compound at 13–24% growth. This is the textbook super-app cycle: payments and marketplace ride the volume curve; fintech rides the rates curve; the three rarely peak together, which is the diversification dividend.

4. Competitive Structure

The industry is local-monopoly globally, fragmented regionally. Each country has at most one or two integrated super-apps; cross-border share is small. The companies most often grouped with Kaspi.kz are Sea (Shopee/SeaMoney), MercadoLibre (LatAm), Nu Holdings (LatAm consumer fintech) and PagSeguro (Brazil SMB payments). None compete with Kaspi.kz in Kazakhstan. Inside Kazakhstan the threat surface is local: Halyk Bank as the legacy incumbent, cross-border e-commerce platforms in marketplace, and Visa/Mastercard plus the Russian-style QR networks in payments.

Two observations matter for the rest of the report. First, Kaspi's EBITDA margin of 55% is structurally higher than any of the listed super-app peers — the result of integrating a bank charter inside the consumer app rather than running them as separate companies. Second, the multiple compression is large: at a 7x P/E and 1.9x P/S, the market is pricing Kaspi closer to a Kazakhstan-listed regional bank than to MELI or Sea, both of which trade above 50x earnings and 3x sales despite weaker margins. This gap is the principal valuation debate.

5. Regulation, Technology, and Rules of the Game

Super-apps are regulated entities by definition. Three regulators sit on top of Kaspi's perimeter: the National Bank of Kazakhstan (NBK) sets the base rate, deposit-insurance rules and macro-prudential limits; the Agency for Regulation and Development of the Financial Market (ARDFM) issues and renews the banking licence (Kaspi Bank: License No. 1.2.245/61 dated February 3, 2020); and the Ministry of Digital Development oversees the e-government rails that Kaspi piggy-backs on for ID and document delivery.

Technology shifts that change economics are narrower than the popular discussion suggests. QR-based payments and biometric authentication ("Kaspi Alaqan", pay-by-palm, launched 2025) raise switching costs and let Kaspi extend its acceptance network without card-scheme fees. Generative AI is a margin lever inside underwriting (proprietary data plus bureau checks gives 99.9% of approvals in under six seconds) and customer support, not a market-disrupting threat from outside. The under-appreciated tech risk is the regulator-mandated interoperability of QR rails: when central banks force open-loop QR (as in Brazil's PIX or India's UPI), payments take rates compress sharply and the model has to lean harder on lending economics.

6. The Metrics Professionals Watch

Skip the GAAP top line first. The leading indicators for a super-app live in operating KPIs, and the order in which they move is what professionals look for.

Read the KPIs before reading the revenue line. If transactions per active customer or DAU/MAU break, the GMV line will break two quarters later. If deposit-funding share falls, the cost of risk will climb four quarters later. The sequence is the moat.

7. Where Kaspi.kz Fits

The three Kazakhstan platforms each contribute a similar share of FY2025 net income — $702–857M — but the underlying volumes that drive them differ by an order of magnitude. The Payments engine moves $87.5 billion of TPV through a sub-1% take rate; the Fintech engine earns its margin on $23.1 billion of TFV via NIM; the Marketplace engine clips a small take rate on $13.2 billion of GMV. Reading the segments side-by-side makes one fact clear: the company has three different businesses with three different sensitivities, so anyone who calls Kaspi "a bank" or "an e-commerce play" is over-simplifying.

8. What to Watch First

For a beginner professional investor opening this name for the first time, the following seven signals will tell you within a single quarter whether the industry backdrop is improving or deteriorating for Kaspi.kz. Each is observable in primary filings or central-bank releases.