Industry
Industry — Diversified Fintech / Super-app
Figures converted from KZT at historical FX rates — see data/company.json.fx_rates. Ratios, margins, and multiples are unitless and unchanged.
Kaspi.kz does not sit cleanly in one industry — it operates a two-sided "super-app" that bundles three industries into one P&L: a card-acquiring + QR payments business, a third-party online marketplace, and a consumer/SME lending bank funded by retail deposits. Think of it as a domestic financial services + e-commerce platform whose unit economics depend on a single user base monetised three different ways. Figures are reported in US dollars at the period-end FX rate; where global comparisons are quoted in another currency, the original unit and date are preserved.
1. Industry in One Page
The diversified fintech / super-app category sells digital distribution of payments, commerce, and credit through one mobile front-end. End consumers and merchants pay via three monetisation mechanics that compound on a shared customer base: a take-rate on payment volume, a commission on marketplace transactions plus rising advertising/delivery fees, and net interest income on a loan book funded by sticky deposits. Profits exist because the same MAU produces revenue in all three pots while customer-acquisition cost and underwriting data sit on one stack. The cycle is driven by consumer spending power and local interest rates: when rates rise, fintech net interest margin (NIM) compresses; when QR/B2B payments scale faster than card acquiring, payments take-rate falls; in both downturns the marketplace acts as a stabiliser via value-added services. The thing most newcomers miss: this is not a "fintech" in the sense of disruptive payments — most of the profit pool is banking (NIM on a deposit-funded loan book) re-skinned with consumer-tech distribution.
Payments Net Income ($M, FY2025 ex-TR)
Marketplace Net Income ($M, FY2025 ex-TR)
Fintech Net Income ($M, FY2025 ex-TR)
Takeaway: Kazakhstan profit is split close to 36% Payments / 31% Marketplace / 30% Fintech — none of the three legs is a side business. That balance is the structural feature of the super-app model and the reason peer-comparisons against pure-play acquirers, marketplaces, or digital banks all miss part of the picture.
2. How This Industry Makes Money
Each leg of the super-app collects a different unit of revenue from the same transaction stream. Understanding those units is the cleanest way to read the business and to interpret quarterly disclosures.
Capital intensity differs sharply across the three. Payments is asset-light once the POS and QR fleet is deployed; the marketplace is asset-light in its 3P form (Kaspi exited the 1P e-Cars line in Q4 2025 explicitly because it was "capital-intensive with limited possibility to replicate in other markets"); the fintech leg, by contrast, is a balance-sheet business — it requires regulatory capital, takes credit risk, and is funded by retail deposits. The blended group ROE printed in the high 50s percent for FY2025, which is high by global bank standards (mid-teens) and high even by listed-fintech super-app standards (Nu Holdings, MercadoLibre).
Why margins exist: the super-app earns excess returns because the cost to acquire a customer is paid once and recovered across three monetisation pots. A pure card acquirer pays the same CAC and only earns the take-rate; a pure marketplace earns commission only; a pure digital bank earns NIM only. Kaspi earns all three on a single user — the FY2025 disclosure of 77 monthly transactions per active consumer is the quantitative version of that statement.
3. Demand, Supply, and the Cycle
The super-app model is not "cycle-proof" — it has three distinct cycles bundled together, and the leg that hurts first depends on which macro variable is moving.
The FY2025 read is instructive. Total payment volume in Kazakhstan grew 19%, but Payments segment net income grew only 13% — because the consumer mix shifted toward Kaspi QR (low fee) and B2B Payments (low fee). At the same time, funding costs in Kazakhstan rose roughly 20 bps year-over-year per company commentary, on top of cumulative tightening worth around 220 bps in the prior cycle, which is why Fintech net income rose only 9% despite TFV growing 13%. The Marketplace leg actually slowed to 6% net-income growth (ex-Türkiye) as the 1P e-Cars business was wound down and value-added services scaled. That is the classic super-app downturn signature: the three engines do not all sag at once, but the headline mid-teens growth comes from a different leg every year.
4. Competitive Structure
Within Kazakhstan, the diversified fintech / super-app category is structurally winner-take-most: the customer-merchant flywheel, the underwriting-data flywheel, and the brand-recall flywheel are each individually consolidating, and Kaspi has all three. Outside Kazakhstan, the category is fragmented and Kaspi is a new entrant.
Where this matters for the investment case: there is no listed pure-play substitute for the Kazakhstan super-app. The closest peer set is six names — Nu Holdings, MercadoLibre, Hepsiburada, PagSeguro, StoneCo for international fintech super-app and payments analogs; and Halyk Bank as the only listed in-country competitor. Each illuminates a slice of Kaspi's economics but none captures the whole bundle, which is one reason Kaspi's listed multiple historically trades at an emerging-market discount to MercadoLibre and Nu despite delivering materially higher ROE.
How to read the peer numbers. Net margin spreads are dramatic across the peer set — from Hepsiburada's negative single-digit (still in scaling-investment phase) to Kaspi's mid-20s percent. STNE's headline margin is distorted by a one-off; PAGS's 10.7% is a realistic acquirer benchmark. The honest comparison is that Kaspi runs at the high end of the fintech super-app peer set, and that gap is what investors are paying for — or, depending on view, what is at risk of compressing as Hepsiburada integrates and Türkiye becomes a larger share of the consolidated P&L.
5. Regulation, Technology, and Rules of the Game
The economics of the diversified fintech category are reshaped by three external forces: financial-services regulation, payment-rail rules, and platform technology shifts. Each is local, not global, which is why the super-app model is hard to export and why the in-market regulator is one of the most important stakeholders for an investor.
The technology stack matters as an economic variable, not as a marketing slogan. Three concrete examples from FY2025: (1) Kaspi originates 99.9% of loans in less than six seconds, which is the gating reason the BNPL leg can sustain a 2% Cost of Risk — slower underwriters would either reject more applications or take more losses. (2) Kaspi Postomats reached 10,441 units and now handle ~58% of marketplace deliveries; this is the operating fixed cost that determines whether 84% of orders can be delivered free, which in turn protects basket size. (3) Kaspi Alaqan pay-by-palm launched in December 2025 and reached over 500,000 registered users in under three months — a defensive move against Apple/Samsung Pay and a new data layer for fraud signals. Each is a regulatory + technology bet that converts directly into an operating line.
6. The Metrics Professionals Watch
Professional investors track this category not on revenue or EPS — those compound a payments mix-shift, a marketplace take-rate change, and a NIM swing into one number that hides the story. The metrics that decompose value creation sit at the platform level.
7. Where Kaspi.kz JSC Fits
Within the diversified fintech / super-app category, Kaspi.kz is the dominant domestic incumbent in a small-but-deep market, now beginning a regional expansion into the much larger Türkiye market via Hepsiburada and the pending Rabobank A.Ş. license acquisition. Its industry position is unusual: in Kazakhstan it is essentially the category, while in Türkiye it is a turnaround acquirer of a sub-scale e-commerce player.
One sentence to carry into the rest of the deck. Kaspi is the rare case where the industry is the company within its home market — which is why competition, moat, and downside cases must be framed in terms of (i) Kazakhstan macro and regulation, (ii) Türkiye integration execution, and (iii) the structural risk that consumer payment volumes mix-shift toward lower-take-rate rails faster than fintech and marketplace can compensate.
8. What to Watch First
These are the eight signals that would tell a reader the industry backdrop is improving or deteriorating for Kaspi.kz — each observable in filings, transcripts, or local-market data within the next four quarters.
The most decision-relevant of these are signals 1, 2, and 4 — payments take-rate, Cost of Risk, and Türkiye marketplace EBITDA — because they capture the three legs of the flywheel each running on a different cycle. If all three move the right way over the next four quarters, the underlying mix supports the bull frame. If two move against the company while the third stays flat, headline net-income growth can still print positive even as the underlying mix deteriorates — that is the setup most likely to compress the multiple before the EPS line registers it.