The CEO of Kaspi.kz on Designing an Essential Superapp

According to Kaspi.kz CEO 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. Today, it is the most widely used platform in Kazakhstan for financial and government services, payments, and e-commerce. It serves 75% of the population and generates $2 billion in annual net income on revenues of just under $5 billion. The U.S. equivalent might be having PayPal, Amazon, Capital One, Booking.com, and Instacart all in one app. How did we effect such a dramatic transformation? With an unwavering focus on creating and delivering more value to customers.

There’s no better illustration of this than our decision to create a single superapp to house all our services. At the time, marketing experts told us people wouldn’t want to hold savings or checking accounts with the same brand they bought kitchen appliances and clothing from. IT experts told us we needed different interfaces for each business because different online activities required drastically different user experiences. But was it best for customers to download multiple apps and deal with numerous passwords and log-ins? Or to get everything they need to manage their lives in one place?

The answer was clear. Our mission was and still is to improve people’s lives through innovation, making everything we touch cheaper, faster, and more convenient. We knew the superapp was the best way to do it.

And in the years since, we’ve been proven right. Not only do we have the greatest penetration in our home market of any technology company, we have the highest engagement too. Seventy percent of the people who use our app do so daily—something no social network can boast. Our customers conduct an average of 73 transactions per month—more than PayPal sees from the average North American user in a year. And we process more than 10 billion transactions annually—four times what Visa and Mastercard do in Kazakhstan combined.

We’ve watched the development of superapps in other geographies—most notably China—with interest. But having designed our organizational culture, structures, processes, and incentives to prioritize customer needs, we believe we have a unique story to tell. Now, as a Nasdaq-listed company expanding into Türkiye, we’re keen to share insights into our business model with the rest of the world.