The Kazakh-based brokerage-turned-fintech company Freedom Holding Corp is building an app, which is not just a banking service, it is supposed to organise your whole life.

Freedom Holding Corp has emerged as one of central Asia's most ambitious digital players, using a rapidly growing super-app to take a meaningful bite out of Kazakhstan's dominant payments market and reposition itself as an ecosystem company rather than a specialist broker.

The group, whose brokerage arm has traded on Nasdaq since 2019 and serves European clients through its Cyprus-based Freedom24 subsidiary, has spent the past two years building a mobile platform that now counts 5.2mn users — equivalent to more than a quarter of Kazakhstan's entire population.

A steep adoption curve

The growth trajectory has been steep. Launched in April 2024, the app reached 500,000 users by December of that year before accelerating sharply to 1.4mn in January 2025. More than 3.8mn additional users followed in the fifteen months after that, bringing the total to 5.2mn by April 2026. The platform now sits at the centre of a broader group ecosystem spanning over 11mn customers across brokerage, banking and insurance mostly concentrated in Kazakhstan.

Currently ranked number one and number three on the App Store and Google Play respectively in Kazakhstan, the app bundles banking, investment, e-commerce, travel, ticketing, loyalty services and much more into a single interface. The company's chief executive, Timur Turlov, has set his sights squarely on Kaspi, the Nasdaq-listed Kazakh payments champion that once commanded around 85% of domestic economic transactions. Freedom claims to have taken roughly 15% of that share in a single year, leaving Kaspi at approximately 70%.

"Kaspi is a great competitor — Nasdaq-listed, huge market presence, 13-14mn users, almost everyone in Kazakhstan," Turlov told IntelliNews in an exclusive interview. "And we took around 15% from them in a single year. So it is possible to compete even if someone has already consolidated the market."

Turning customers into shareholders

The loyalty programme is perhaps the platform's most distinctive feature. Cashback is automatically converted into fractional shares of Freedom Holding Corp itself — a mechanism the company calls "Freedom Currency" — turning customers into shareholders and aligning their financial interests with the group's performance.

"I don't just make money from them," Turlov said. "I am sharing value with them. If the bank is rising, so will their wealth."

The company has also built out a travel vertical it believes can rival established global players. "We have already developed a technology which may compete with [tourist company] Expedia," Turlov said, citing direct airline relationships and complex routing capabilities. Freedom claims domestic flight market share of between 25-30%, up from roughly 10%. Card design collaborations with DC Comics have added a further layer of consumer differentiation — "an invention from my team, not my idea," Turlov noted. "We issue a lot of different cards, and it's another one of our features because it just looks better than other banks. It's also a minor advantage."

The breadth of the offering is, by Turlov's telling, precisely the point. "The ecosystem is big," he said. "It is not one reason that makes the difference, but a combination of all the features we provide."

Beyond transactions: the case for embedded engagement

Speaking at Freedom's Inside event in Almaty, Turlov sought to distinguish the company's model from conventional super-app competitors, which he argued remain constrained by a focus on discrete transactional services. "A super-app — around a set of transactional services. This is a working model," he acknowledged, before adding that such platforms struggle to retain users when rivals offer better pricing or convenience.

Freedom's ambition runs further: "A platform integrated into people's daily lives on several levels simultaneously", encompassing banking, brokerage, insurance and lifestyle alongside newer verticals in education, healthcare and urban infrastructure. "We are creating a different kind of attachment. Not transactional loyalty, but engagement," Turlov said. At sufficient scale, he suggested, the platform begins to resemble infrastructure rather than a product — the company, he argued, is "not just a company" but part of a broader system of services.

Adding a voice: the AI layer

Freedom is now deepening the platform with AI-driven functionality, aiming to shift user interaction from conventional tap-based navigation towards conversational, voice-led streamlined services.

At the centre of the update is a voice-based AI assistant capable of executing 119 commands in Kazakh and Russian, covering tasks from payments and inter-account transfers to loan servicing, payroll and invoicing. The assistant, speaking in the voice of Turlov himself, is designed to reduce friction in routine financial operations and deepen engagement within the platform.

Early usage data points to rapid uptake concentrated around core functions, with money transfers, balance checks and investment operations emerging as the most frequently used features in the first month. The integration also targets small businesses through the Freedom Business platform, where AI-driven automation tools are combined with free access to ChatGPT for entrepreneurs across Kazakhstan — extending the app's role beyond transactions into workflow optimisation and decision support.

The next phase will see these capabilities rolled out across the wider super-app, allowing users to access financial services alongside lifestyle offerings such as ticket purchases, insurance and grocery orders through voice commands alone. The system is hosted entirely within Freedom's own infrastructure, as the company positions the platform as a secure, unified entry point into its broader digital ecosystem.

Exporting the model

Kazakhstan, with its young, digitally literate population and strong government commitment to digitalisation, has served as the proving ground for the strategy. Freedom is now seeking to export it, with a launch already under way in Tajikistan and expansions planned for Georgia, Turkey and potentially Europe. The pitch to new markets is deliberate: Freedom enters not as a start-up, Turlov said, but "with a working solution." To underpin the push, the group is consolidating its services under a single brand — one company behind it all.

Whether the model can travel, and whether its gains against Kaspi can be sustained against a well-resourced incumbent, remains to be seen. What is harder to dispute is the scale of the ambition. The brokerage that listed in New York six years ago has grown into something altogether different — a glimpse, perhaps, of what the future of banking looks like.