Freedom Holding Corp. is aiming to create a fully fledged digital infrastructure in Kazakhstan that contributes to the country’s development. This was stated by Timur Turlov at the FRHC Board of Directors Summit, which took place on 25–29 January in Limassol, Cyprus.
The scale of a global corporation
The Freedom Holding Corp. (FRHC) ecosystem includes Freedom Broker, Freedom Bank Kazakhstan, Freedom Finance Europe, as well as the group’s insurance, technology and lifestyle companies.
Revenue of Freedom Holding Corp. for the nine months of the 2026 financial year (ended 31 December 2025) approached $1.7 bn. Net profit for the period amounted to around $145 mln, while earnings per share (EPS) reached $2.43. These figures reflect the resilience of the business and the company’s ability to maintain profitability while scaling.
Total assets reached $12.4 bn, with equity estimated at approximately $1.4 bn. Cash, cash equivalents and investment assets amount to around $6.6 bn, forming a significant financial buffer. Operating activities generate substantial cash flow, giving the company freedom for long-term investment and development.
The scale of FRHC is particularly evident in its client base: more than 7.2 mln clients use Freedom’s services across all areas, and including affiliated companies, more than 11 mln unique clients. This includes 4.5 mln banking clients, around 1.2 mln insurance clients and 828,000 brokerage accounts. The number of users of digital and ecosystem services, including the SuperApp, is close to 4 mln people, indicating Freedom’s mass presence in clients’ everyday financial scenarios.
Freedom Holding Corp. operates in 21 countries. The company’s shares are traded on NASDAQ and are included in the Russell 3000 index and the Moneyball investment portfolio by Motley Fool, confirming its stable position in international capital markets. By the end of 2025, the holding’s market capitalisation was estimated at $10 bn.
Such scale changes the very logic of the company’s development. When a business reaches billion-dollar revenues, a multi-billion balance sheet and a mass client base, the key priority becomes not the growth of individual services, but the management of the entire system as a whole. The most important conditions for the corporation’s further growth become its resilience, architecture and role in the country’s economy.
It was in this context that the FRHC Board of Directors Summit recorded a transition to a new strategic framework, as described by Timur Turlov: from the logic of a set of products to the logic of a service-based digital infrastructure on the scale of Kazakhstan, ready for export to other countries.
Three levels of change
Timur Turlov emphasised that strategy for a company is a way of synchronising the understanding of ongoing changes.
«Strategy is always an answer to the reality we are in. It does not emerge according to a schedule, but when old answers essentially stop working,» he noted in his address to the Board of Directors.
According to him, the holding has undergone a qualitative stage of growth in recent years that requires a new level of reflection.
«We have ceased to be a collection of separate companies and have become an ecosystem,» said the CEO of Freedom Holding Corp.
In his speech at the Board Summit, Timur Turlov described the context in which the holding is developing today, highlighting three levels of change: the company, the market and the country.
Speaking about internal development, he noted that rapid growth inevitably leads to increased management complexity.
«As a company, we have been growing quickly recently. At such a pace, it is objectively difficult to avoid the symptoms of growing pains,» said Turlov, emphasising that the next stage is linked to improving the manageability and resilience of the ecosystem.
Regarding the market, he drew attention to the fact that in a number of segments, development is increasingly being replaced by competition over functions:
«Some companies in the market have reached a visible limit, and much is turning not into development, but into a race of services.»
At the same time, he outlined Freedom’s position:
«We do not plan to be drawn into this race. We have always been and will remain trendsetters.»
The third level of change, according to the head of the holding operating in dozens of countries, is the country itself — Kazakhstan.
«The state is embarking on large-scale internal digitalisation and has simultaneously begun deep institutional reforms,» said Timur Turlov, emphasising that these processes form the long-term context for business.
A central place in Timur Turlov’s address at the FRHC Board Summit was given to the role of Kazakhstan, where the holding’s current model was formed:
«The DNA of Freedom Holding contains advanced business practices of American business, which in many ways made us who we are. But at the same time, we are literally embedded in the realities of the country in which we are building our core business. Moreover, I now clearly understand that without Kazakhstan, without the conditions provided by our country, Freedom as it exists today would simply be impossible.»
Moreover, the key message from Timur Turlov to his team of 17,000 people was the need to stop thinking in terms of individual products and to start thinking in terms of building institutions and an environment of trust. This, he believes, will make the business sustainable and Kazakhstan wealthier.
Business as infrastructure
Freedom is moving from the logic of individual services to an infrastructure-based model.
«We are not a showcase. Our logic is infrastructural. Our DNA is fintech and the creation of an environment of trust, not the arrangement of goods on a shelf,» said Timur Turlov during the Cyprus Summit. «Either Freedom remains a portfolio of services constantly chasing the market and each other, or it becomes a full-fledged digital infrastructure that contributes to the development of society and the state.»
As Timur Turlov noted, it was precisely the creation of infrastructure and the development of culture that once allowed the company to grow together with the market. This principle is now fixed as the strategic foundation for the next stage of the holding’s development.
Global context
The model that Freedom Holding Corp. is arriving at today is unique for Kazakhstan and Central Asia, yet it fits well within several global trends that have emerged in the global digital economy and fintech. There are at least four such trends.
The first trend is the transition from individual services to digital infrastructure. In many countries, fintech has long been divided into two levels. The first level consists of user-facing products: applications, services and functions. The second level comprises the underlying infrastructure: payment systems, customer identification, risk management, data handling and regulatory frameworks. It is this second level that is considered more resilient, as it is embedded in the economy and continues to operate regardless of changing fashions in specific products.
The second global trend is the development of embedded finance, where financial services are integrated into non-financial scenarios. Financial services cease to be a separate «trip to the bank» and appear wherever a person already has a daily need, whether it is paying for services, shopping, transport, education or housing. This is confirmed by World Bank research, which views the digital transformation of financial services as a key factor in reshaping the financial system.
The third global trend into which Freedom’s transformation fits is the evolution of super apps. This is not about an application that does «everything at once», but about a single digital entry point into an ecosystem. Such an entry point becomes a unified interface through which the user regularly interacts with services, while the company gains data, frequency of contact and the ability to build long-term relationships. In this model, finance acts not as a showcase, but as a connective element. China’s WeChat and Alipay have built infrastructures of trust, accounting and scoring on the basis of their services.
Finally, the fourth trend is digital public infrastructure. This refers to digital systems that provide the basic rules of interaction in society: accounting, transparency, trust, payments and identification. In some countries, such systems are built by the state; in others, they are created in partnership with private business. A platform-based approach is implemented in Singapore’s digital government services through GovTech Singapore. One of the most well-known examples of cooperation between private companies and states is Palantir, which is embedded in institutional and governmental processes through the provision of infrastructure analytics systems for governments and corporations.
«Digital public infrastructure is the foundational digital building blocks that enable accounting, payments and identification at the scale of the entire economy,» notes a World Bank report on digital infrastructure.
It is precisely within the logic of developing these trends that Freedom’s current transformation is taking place. The company is moving from a set of digital product services to a digital infrastructure model in which finance, data and everyday digitised services are combined into an ecosystem. Moreover, the value of this system is determined not so much by fragmented target audiences as by fundamental institutions, the state and society. In such a system, their trust is the main metric of success.
The transformation of the Freedom ecosystem is not an attempt to copy other models, but a response to a global shift and a national-level demand: from competition of functions to the creation of sustainable digital foundations for economic and social interaction.
«At the same time, the transition to an infrastructural role always brings new risks — from regulatory burden to responsibility for system resilience. It is precisely this balance between scale, control and trust that will become the key challenge of the next stage,» Timur Turlov emphasised.
