Revolutionizing Fintech: Timur Turlov on Freedom Holding’s Vision for Central Asia and Beyond

While the global fintech industry is entering a new era, one defined by scale, speed, and surging tech like AI as well as tokenization.

With the first half of 2025 and the rearview mirror fintechs and banks are facing a fresh set of opportunities and challenges.

Now Freedom Holding has broken ground on a $375 million data center in Kazakh.

And launched a super app for emerging markets and is expanding its wealth and research services here in the US.

So joining me for a closer look at how Freedom plans to connect digital infrastructure as well as financial services and global markets is Timmer Turlo, CEO of Freedom Holding.

Welcome back, Timmer.

Thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you.

Glad to be here.

Yeah, so first and foremost, let's start out by talking about the freedom cloud.

So give us a brief overview and tell us what role you see it playing with the future of Central Asia's digital economy here.

No, I think that Central Asian market, especially Kazakhstanian markets, is growing at very high level because the population itself is very tech optimistic and fintech services develop I think faster than anywhere in the world and we historically have some lack of infrastructure and government sector especially, they have a very long term it took too much time for them to plan to order to. to fulfill all procedures and even banks and fintechs never can adequately plan their demands for calculation for computes, for memory, for all that stuff.

We started to see some shortage of resources for our own ecosystem for our own digital banking insurance stuff, and finally realized that we have a very strong deficit in national cloud for some.

Literal reason we can't use I don't know, Amazon Cloud and sometimes in Kazakhstan we just don't have enough supply at all.

That was the reason why we actually started to invest more to data centers, at least to to keep our infrastructure be enough for our demand and also maybe to help the rest of the customers and it's very interesting.

So we just finished some some part of expansion for our.

A cloud strategy and Freedom Holding is the main customer because even we failed to prognose our compute demands and we see the same with the government sector, for example, because the government sector is planning even worse and their compute demand is growing at the same level as industry and frankly speaking, we now have a lot of discussions to a lot of market participants about building cloud for them and building computers for them.

And here we are fast approaching the opening bell here at the New York Stock Exchange.

BlackBerry is ringing the opening bell, but I do want to ask you about your super app.

So nowadays we have apps for everything, but how does your app differentiate itself and what gives it a competitive advantage?

I think it's the main the main advantage of super app is to keep Uh, high frequency services, uh, together with uh uh services which user can use not such frequent like buying airline tickets as well as doing payments.

So payments you do every day and you buy normally you buy airline tickets a couple of times in a year.

And the same with insurance, so we usually industry pays so much, so much for customer acquisition costs in terms of insurance, and when you just have this opportunity on the same app which you use every day and we just highlight, so you can renew insurance here and you no need to enter any payment data.

You no need to pay to enter any notification data.

So we will get everything from our data storage.

We will with the customer permission we get some.

Thing from the government side and we can show him in one single app with one single notification payments, insurance brokerage and investment portfolios, and also if you like to order some food, you can order some food and we can deliver to the same address and you also don't need to remember your login and password.

You don't need to remember your credit card.

So you can do and make everything from one single app and if you want someone to have some fun and go to. and it's an interesting concert.

So we do this machine learning stuff to make recommendations for concerts which could be interesting, especially for you, and we can highlight on the main page that that's probably your favorite artist that is coming to the city and we can offer you a bus tickets to that once this super up.

That actually works in Kazakhstan.

That helps us to service more than 10 million people in our country.

And finally we have less than 30 seconds here, but what are your growth expansion plans for here in the US?

I believe that at the end of the day, the same approach which we do in Kazakhstan we can do we can do here, and we already built a very efficient digital bank, and we should leverage that outside of Central Asia.

Central Asia is just our laboratory, but being a US company here now with huge access to capital, with a huge access to investors, I hope we can build a very successful fintech here too.

OK, Thira, great to have you back.

Thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you.