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Monday, Aug. 10, 2026 at 8:00 a.m. ET
Investor Relations - David Ferguson
Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder - Mikheil Lomtadze
Deputy Chief Executive Officer - Tengiz Mosidze
Deputy Chief Executive Officer - Yuri Didenko
Operator: Hello, and welcome to today's Kaspi Second Quarter and First Half 2026 Financial Results Call. [Operator Instructions] I'll now turn the call over to David Ferguson from Kaspi to begin. Please go ahead.
David Ferguson: Thanks, Sami. Good morning, good afternoon, everyone. I'm David Ferguson from Kaspi. Welcome to our second quarter and first half 2026 financial results call. With me is Kaspi's CEO and Co-Founder, Mikheil Lomtadze; and our Deputy CEOs, Tengiz Mosidze and Yuri Didenko. As usual, Mikheil will take you through the financial and strategic highlights from the second quarter. I'll talk through the broader financials, and then we'll open the call up to Q&A. So on that note, over to you, Mikheil.
Mikheil Lomtadze: Yes. Thank you, David. Thank you for everyone joining this call. So our financial performance for the second quarter is strong. The revenue went up 16%, adjusted EBITDA 5% considering the performance and strong financial position of the company, the Board is recommending to increase the dividend by 18% compared to the first year dividend. Our core businesses continue to perform the marketplace GMV plus 15%, driven by the e-commerce, which is our strategic most important focus, both in Kazakhstan and Turkiye, it's 28% growth on the constant currency basis. TPV, our major business in the payments still continues to grow very nicely, around 15% growth quarter-on-quarter and average net loan portfolio continues to grow strongly around 18% year-over-year.
So we -- e-commerce is the area which we believe is extremely important for us. That's the final destination for our consumers and merchants is where we can add the most of the value in terms of enabling the purchases and connecting merchants and sellers. So e-commerce GMV has grown nicely around 28% on the constant currency basis year-over-year. And the take rate continues to expand. The main driver of the take rate is the value-added services, which will continue scaling, and that's about delivery and advertising. What is important is how engaged the consumers remain and how frequently they transact with us.
So the number of purchases per consumer continue to grow in both Turkiye and Kazakhstan and the e-com purchases grew 33%, which is a very nice growth, and we delivered in excess of 76 million purchases in the second quarter. About 20% of our GMV is 1P, and that is 1P, mainly the e-grocery in Kazakhstan, which is the fastest-growing e-commerce vertical for us and the 1P in Turkiye, which is electronics and historically has been a category for 1P in Turkiye. And we are about 53% of our GMV in Kazakhstan and 47% in Turkiye.
And again, both for us, the important priority is just continue building up our e-commerce capabilities and making sure that the delivery quality and the speed is improving. The value-added services are monetized, and we just continue working on converting the traffic and the properties that we have into the purchases from our consumers or connecting merchants and consumers to each other successfully. E-commerce has been growing the take rate with the value-added services. As you can see, the value-added services grew 49% on a constant currency growth and 27% real growth, growing faster on the constant currency basis than e-commerce revenue.
Again, just to reinforce the fact that we are extremely responsible in terms of growing those additional sort of services and making sure that we deliver the value for the merchants. And also, we make sure that our services are highly reliable on the delivery side and highly relevant on the advertising side if we sort of promote something to our consumers that actually is something they really need and we deliver value to both merchants and the consumers through this experience. We're also approaching this new stage of our company's development. As you know, the Kaspi has done sort of reinventions of itself or transformations multiple times during this history.
We started from financial services, then we expanded into the ecosystem of everyday services and then we united all the everyday services in a single super app. And now we are approaching the stage when we want to develop the personal AI assistant, which will help with everyday tasks to our consumers and to our merchants. And in the 1st of July, we launched Kasper, which is the assistant for our consumers. We started with one task now, which is actually enabling shopping. So Kasper actually is built on our technology and it is built on our data and built on our consumer experience, and it's in a single mobile application. So it's actually integrated in our super app.
So Kasper, we call him Kasper or the new personal assistant. And he can actually understand your needs. He can recommend the best products. He can engage in a conversation with you and ask the clarifying questions, compare different products, give you the reviews and so on and so forth. So actually, and it's enabled in voice and text, so you can actually either type your task or you can record it by voice and then Kasper helps you to find the right product for you in 20 million products in our Kazakhstan e-commerce platform.
He can follow up with the smart questions and then he can read you with the right product for you, which you can after complete in our e-commerce. So we have launched it in the 1st of July. We have been scaling during the month. So now it's available to everyone, to all our consumers in Kazakhstan. So it has been very rapid sort of scaling. It's still early to give you any sort of detailed performance metrics, but I think the metrics we already have are quite encouraging. So 1 out of 5 customers whom customer was available actually use it. Response rate is around 3 seconds.
So this just tells you that all the sort of the investments we have done both in the compute, but also in optimizing the speed have played off really nicely. So you as a consumer get response really quickly, which is extremely important for any AI model or assistant. The consumers are looking for the product across pretty much the entire catalog. So 22 product categories have been covered so far, which is pretty much our entire catalog, which just tells you that the Kasper is performing the tasks across wide range of the products that we have.
8 in 10 conversations, so 80% of conversations actually end up with a product recommendation and 60% of those take customers to approve the specific product. So if you're looking for a [ document cleaner ], he will just guide you through the process, understand your needs, but then you basically have your product in the shopping cart. And what is important is the speed. So if the customer is 50% faster than just a regular product discovery and 50% faster adding [indiscernible] and 30% faster to the basket.
So again, what we believe is that this sort of technology or this customer experience is leapfrogging all the traditional way of you to finding the product, you're scrolling, you are reading, you are analyzing the information on the screen, you are tapping buttons and so on and so forth. So you're spending much more time going through multiple stages of the product discovery and understanding the product that you need yourself. So Kasper is actually speeding up this process. So Kasper is helping to find the products faster, and he really is working on the task with you rather than you sort of typing in the search box name of the product.
So highly relevant, highly reliable, faster, and those are the most important metrics for us at the moment. We're not looking for -- I mean, our goal is to build the trusted assistant. So assistant is equal trust, which means that if you don't trust your assistant, you can easily fire him. So we treat Kasper like a personal assistant and our priority now is to build the trust, which means highly reliable, highly relevant service that actually helps you to buy a product, which is exactly the product that you need. So this is our priority as we're scaling customers.
So it's just one month, but those are really very encouraging metrics that we observe with the customer interaction of consumers with the customer. This is just an example of the queries, which basically tell you how different it is this interaction with the customer and actually the traditional search or traditional way to find the product, usually type the product that you have in mind. And then a traditional e-commerce or marketplace way to offer your product is you are trying to give you a selection of the products, which you then are reading through, [indiscernible] yourself with a rating, but also narrow it down through filters and other navigation tools, which have been developed over time.
So when customers are interacting with the customer now, they just give them a task. I want to give my granddaughter a gift for her second birthday or I want to have like a aftershave for consistency and [indiscernible] that has a strong smell or I want a spray that I get set up next to the house. So it creates a cool mist. I mean this type of interaction is -- and the type of tasks which customer is getting and able to solve is really remarkable. So that we truly -- we're true sort of believers in this technology, which we have been developing already for quite some time behind the scenes and getting ready to scale it.
So it's really remarkable how consumers interact, how customer really helps. And those examples, which you see here, they actually ended up in a real order. But it's really important when you sort of think how customers do mission shopping, how they focus on delivery, on we need the items which can be delivered within 3 hours or solve this type of problem, which I have like after double-sided tape that was left on the plastic window, what product will help to remove it. I mean this is not a regular search. This is you asking someone to help with an advice. So all those things are extremely encouraging for us.
We're scaling customer as we speak in our e-commerce platform. And again, our mission is to develop a personal assistant for everyday tasks and e-commerce and shopping is just the one task we're now focused on. But in the future, we believe that Kasper can help with all other tasks across all our services in our super app. And I just would like to give you a bit of a demo. So some of you that actually watch the screen, I think it would be pretty cool. So David, can we go to the demo? So Kasper actually has a dedicated space in our e-commerce. So you can basically type the task which you want Kasper to perform.
So for example, I need a vacuum cleaner. Then Kasper do basic analysis and he starts asking the clarifying questions. For example, what type of vacuum cleaners suits you best, but then he goes into the requirements. So one of the things which is important for any vacuum cleaner is size of your apartment. So he will ask you to clarify size of your apartment. Then he will ask you the budget, what's your budget within which you want to buy the vacuum cleaner. And then in basically a couple of seconds, he pulls together for you different vacuum cleaners, which are available in Kaspi shop [indiscernible] described in a simple language.
He gives you a list of the vacuum cleaners, which are acceptable for you and then you can ask him to compare specific models. And then he wants comparison. So on one screen, you can see the main characteristics and you can compare the products. You can actually use your voice, so you can give him task with your voice and this task can be actually something which is really cool, for example, in terms of added value, like which of these vacuum cleaners is best suited for a personal modalities. And he gives you a selection of the products which fit this criteria and explains why. If you see some technical terms, then you can ask him.
For example, he's telling you that HEPA filter is important, and you can ask him what is HEPA filter. And he can tell you in a simple language what is HEPA filter and then you select the vacuum cleaner you want, you push the button and that's it. You can continue to the checkout and actually buying the product. All the chats obviously store, they are personalized and things like that, you can go back and forth. So it's really very interesting and it's important development for us. As I said, we are starting from the shopping experience because that's where we can add most of the value.
But over time, we plan Kasper to expand in all our services in our super apps and also the service is highly scalable. And when it built on the high-quality data, it becomes highly relevant. And obviously, the Kasper is highly scalable to all our other markets and [indiscernible]. So we'll be thinking about scaling into Turkiye as well. Another -- just a quick update. So we have secured the banking license. So we've basically completed the acquisition of Rabobank and now we are building up our fintech capabilities. So we will be investing around $300 million as we initially said in order to just for the capital of the bank.
We're scaling fintech products now, and we're building up the capabilities to roll them out next year. And we expect no material impact this year. But obviously, the sort of the combination of -- I mean, this is fintech and financial services is where we started. So we're true believers that you can deliver the most value to your consumers and to your merchants when you actually combine capabilities of the fintech and e-commerce together. So that's something which is important strategically for us. This is something which we are extremely serious and successful and we'll be rolling them out sort of next year, the fintech products, both for consumers and merchants. We are not sitting idle, obviously.
So we have been working on launching the new shopping mall based on the consumer finance license, which we already have in Turkiye. And we've launched the new shopping loan on Hepsiburada. Basically, flow is extremely similar to what you actually have in the Kasper itself. So you can actually select the product; based on the product, you can select the monthly payment, which feed best of your needs and then you can proceed seamlessly through the checkout. So this product is -- we're piloting and the new shopping loan is already 0.54% of the GMV in June.
Again, we have been preparing ourselves for quite some time in any financial services originating loan or financing customer is step number one. So actually being paid back is more important than originating the loan. So for all these months, we have been building up our risk management capabilities. We're rolling out risk management, which consists of the approval, managing the consumer and also the collection process, like the entire sort of loan journey we have been implementing. We are rolling out now. So now we're comfortable with all the metrics, and we're piloting the new cash loan basically on the Hepsiburada platform.
And again, we're strong believers that combining this around the consumers and merchants shopping experience and the fintech experience and the financial products will give us a more -- will create a lot of value for consumers and merchants and therefore, a lot of value for the company. The products which we will be focused on to roll out as we build the foundation for them will be products around shopping, around merchants. And you know all the products that Kaspi has, right? So we have pure shopping loan, BNPL, merchant finance and the consumer finance products and obviously, savings accounts and so on and so forth.
So you can expect us that next year, we'll be launching those products in Turkiye and basic license allows us to do that and technology we're rolling out in Turkiye encourages and risk management basically, all those things coming together very nicely. So we're very optimistic about launching financial services and fintech products in Turkiye.
David Ferguson: All right. So thank you, Mikheil. So just to run through the financials, starting firstly with Marketplace. So Marketplace constant currency GMV growth of 15% year-on-year. So as you saw, that's driven by e-commerce GMV growth of 28% with e-commerce and travel broadly flat, consistent with trends in the first quarter. Take rate increased 120 bps -- sorry, 110 bps to 12.1%, again, driven by e-commerce and specifically advertising and delivery. The revenue and EBITDA growth of 11% and 9% that is reported growth, not constant currency. So impacted by 21% depreciation of the Turkish lira versus the Kazakh tenge. That's the first thing to keep in mind.
And the second thing to keep in mind, 9% EBITDA growth, that differential versus revenue growth of that margin pressure, that's sort of the least pronounced we've seen actually over the last couple of years and despite the investments that we're making into Hepsiburada. Moving on to payments. TPV growth of 13%. That's a slight moderation, reflecting a slight moderation in inflation. And if inflation continues to come down, TPV growth will reduce accordingly. The take rate declines by 7 bps. So again, that is something similar to what we saw in the first quarter. Long run trend though, driven by changes in product mix in favor of Kaspi Pay.
The result is reported revenue growth of 5% and EBITDA down 1%. The pressure on EBITDA is 2 things. Number one, it's the investment in Kaspi [indiscernible]. So that's [ PayPal ]. It's tech and product development spend. And number two, to keep in mind that adjusted EBITDA excludes the interest revenue that payments generate. So that interest revenue is up 15% year-on-year. That's not reflected in EBITDA, but is reflected in net income is net income accretive. And then on to fintech. Firstly, we talked on our last call about strategically focusing on loans that generate more revenue. These are longer duration loans.
So what that really means is within the loan portfolio, the mix is shifting BNPL, short duration, low revenue generating loan is getting smaller in the mix. Other loans, general purpose merchant financing are growing in share with the mix. So you're seeing decent loan portfolio growth of 18%. The mix changing in favor of higher revenue generating loans. Pricing is stable, and so the result is faster revenue growth, revenue growth above net loan portfolio growth and revenue growth up 23% year-on-year. So that's the first point. The second point would be that you see the cost of funding remains an issue, up 150 bps year-on-year in the second quarter.
However, as some of you will have seen, Kazakhstan lowered its national bank rate at the end of June. And we lowered on one of our products, our deposit rate last week, effective last Wednesday, I believe. So that was our first rate cut for over 2 years. It applies to our 3-month duration product, which is around 30% of deposits. We lowered the rate from 20% to 19%. So clearly, this isn't reflected in Q2 numbers. Some of it will be reflected in Q3. It's a 3-month duration product. So it will be reflected to a much greater extent in the fourth quarter and then fully as we go into next year.
But the bigger point to keep in mind is this isn't just about one rate cut. For the last several years on this call, we've been talking about how high rates have been a pressure on the bottom line. If inflation continues to fall in Kazakhstan, rates will continue to come down. You can see the growth in our deposits is strong, up 21%. So naturally, we will be able to pass those rate cuts through, and that will be very beneficial to the bottom line for us over actually not just 1 quarter, but potentially over the next couple of years. In the second quarter, EBITDA up 6% versus the revenue growth of 23%.
On the risk side of things, cost of risk 0.7%. That's up slightly to 0.6% in the second quarter of last year, but flat quarter-on-quarter. We would expect cost of risk to moderate slightly in the second half of the year. The NPL ratio, NPL coverage trends consistent with what we talked about previously that the portfolio mix shifts, particularly towards merchant financing and to a lesser extent, the car loan. These are products with a higher level of -- higher probability of collection. Therefore, we keep those NPLs on the balance sheet for longer, a higher probability of collection means they require less coverage. So this remains just a function of changing mix.
If you look at the sort of the real-time credit metrics, you see whether it be first, second payment default on the left or delinquency rates on the right, they remain low and stable. So to sort of wrap everything up for the second quarter, reported revenue up 15%, driven by e-commerce and fintech revenue growth. Adjusted EBITDA up 5%, impacted by higher rates and investments into [indiscernible] and net income flat, again, reflecting those same pressures on EBITDA. And you should also keep in mind that the regulatory changes that were announced last year, particularly higher national bank reserve requirements have been introduced in 2 phases. The first phase was last year.
The second [indiscernible] is in the second quarter of this year. So you see that pressure in net income. And as we go into next year, that is in the base as well. On another way of putting things up, I think this just very clearly illustrates where the pressure on profitability is coming from. It's coming from interest rates. We've always said that, that is cyclical. It now looks at the start of the cycle that going from being a negative from being a headwind to being a tailwind. When you think about the investments that we're making into Kaspi and new things tech and product spend, sales and marketing, not just [indiscernible] Kazakhstan as well.
But actually, you can see that in the context of Kaspi.kz the earnings generation, they're relatively small. That's whether you cut it from an earnings perspective or if you look at from a dividend perspective, the cash that we're able to return despite these factors and despite these investments. On the guidance, guidance reiterated, GMV up 17% as of the first half of the year. Guidance for the full year remains around 20%. We would expect faster trends in the second half versus the second quarter driven by the timing of promotional events and other product initiatives. TPV growth looked 13% versus the guidance of around 15%.
There will be -- [ assuming ] inflation moderates, that will be a downward pressure, although integration with Apple Pay should see us benefit from higher overseas volumes, particularly over the summer period. And as we talked about, we've moved from TFE guidance to average net loan portfolio guidance 20% in the first half of the year, guiding for 15% for the full year. EBITDA is trending up 7% at this stage in the year versus the guidance of around 15%. So overall, we're comfortably on track for where we expected to be at this point in the year. So on that note, Sam, let's open the call...
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Gabor Kemeny.
Gabor Kemeny: Can I first ask about the fintech business, please? Indeed a decline in your deposit pricing for the first time. I think you cut your deposit rate around 2 months after the Central Bank policy rate cut. Is this dynamic is reflective of how you expect your pricing to evolve in light of the Central Bank policy rates? And can you share your thoughts on how deposit -- your deposit pricing may evolve in the next few quarters? Yes, my other question would be just on the combination of this very quick deposit growth in the quarter, coupled with a drop in your deposit pricing.
If you can elaborate a bit further on these trends, please, which clearly left you in a better funding position than you have been for some time. And my final question would be on the marketplace dynamics. It looks like Kazakhstan was growing more quickly this time than Turkey. Can you shed some light on how these respective markets are evolving?
David Ferguson: Mikheil, do you want to take actually all of those questions?
Mikheil Lomtadze: Yes, sure. So thank you for your questions. In terms of the deposit base, I mean, in general, we're really focused on always on acquiring the sort of the customers and delivering them the best product and experience. So the previous actions, which we really had resulted in a very strong customer and deposit inflow. In terms of our strategy for the pricing in the future, I mean, our general strategy really will remain the same. So we just look at the dynamics.
And if we believe that we will get -- if there is a relationship really strong, considering the market dynamics and the rates on the market, relationship between the way that we price our products and how we acquire customers. And if we believe that there is a room to reduce the interest rate because the dynamics on the changing [indiscernible] of the market allow us to do, then we will do it. So there is no magical formula basically behind it. And our decision to reduce the rate was driven by basically these dynamics. So what you can expect is this product -- specific product, which is the 3-month saving account around 30% of our deposit base.
So you expect the impact -- positive impact financially in -- by the end of the year as deposits turn, the duration is again on deposit is 3 months. So all the deposits will be repriced when the duration is finished. So basically. In terms of the marketplace dynamics, I mean, again, we have a bit different strategies on the market. So our e-commerce is a priority. But in Kazakhstan, what we're doing is we're just developing the consumer experience based on the specific verticals. And that's what gives us the sort of the successful growth on the e-commerce side.
We are also growing extremely fast on the e-grocery side, so which is also helping both with the consumer engagement, but also profitability on the marketplace, but most importantly, the growth. So in Kazakhstan, our strategy is just -- we're working vertical by vertical. Again, the electronics has not really recovered just because of all the price changes and the conflict of the Middle East and things like that, supply chain is still challenging, GPU prices and chip prices going up. So you still see the growth because all other verticals are growing very nicely, everything around clothing or car spare parts or home items and things like that.
So we're really happy with the way we're proceeding in Kazakhstan and the strategy there is go vertical by vertical. And in Turkiye, our strategy considering that we're just starting to actually launch the products for the consumers, especially on the fintech side for us is extremely important to work on foundational things. Even though growth has been there, our focus has not been on the growth, right? Our focus really has been on the consumers, so consumer experience, Net Promoter Score, merchant experience, delivery speed, which we have improved dramatically during the last 12 months year-over-year, like the consumer frequency of transactions increased 15% in Turkiye.
So all those things, basically, the strategy there to put it in a simple word, it is much better to have 1 million customers which love you rather than 3 million or 5 million customers, which have just occasional shopping with you. And the reason why we want this 1 million customers to love us is because next products which we will launch, they will use those products if they are in with our existing consumer experience. So in Turkiye, the growth has not been the goal. We have grown nicely. Our goal is to make customers even happier and the merchants even happier.
And we're building the foundation for the phase of the growth coming next year, and we just want to drive the adoption of the new products, which we will launch next year, especially on the fintech side.
David Ferguson: I'll just add on [indiscernible] Turkiye. When you're looking at its performance in the second quarter, I think you should look actually at order growth over the first half because you probably remember, there was a lot of retail disruption in Turkiye in the first half, March, April of last year. So that has sort of distorted the comp quarter-on-quarter, both in Q1 and Q2. And probably if you look over a longer period of time, H1 where orders increased just under 18%, you get a better indication of the performance of the business this year.
Operator: Our next question comes from Maksim Nekrasov.
Maksim Nekrasov: I have a couple of questions. The first one is very simple. So basically, your first half EBITDA growth was around 7% and was already trending above the full year guidance, while you mentioned the reduction in the deposit rates that should benefit you in the second half of the year. So simply why EBITDA guidance was unchanged? And how should we think about the second half growth and profitability? And the second topic I wanted to ask about, maybe not surprisingly about AI and the Kasper. So I know it's quite early, but maybe if you can tell us about the early benefits you've been seeing so far or any measurable impact?
And also in terms of the costs and what level of investment? And should we expect any significant costs related to that project?
David Ferguson: Thanks, Maksim. Maybe I'll take the first question on the guidance, and then Mikheil can take the AI-related question. So you are right, we've lowered the rate on the 3-month deposit up to around 30% of the deposit base last week, last Wednesday, it will take 3 months to fully reprice that. So you're looking at the benefit really starting to come through from the second part of November. So really only one full month this year. So you're right, there is some benefit of it this year, but it's for a relatively short period of time.
The full benefit of that and actually potentially other rate cuts that we might see will be felt from the beginning of next year.
Mikheil Lomtadze: On the Kasper, we want to pull out the slide.
David Ferguson: Great. So I mean, in terms of the Kasper, we are just one month into it. Obviously, we have been working with Kasper ourselves for much longer. But our consumers across [indiscernible] we have been rolled out now across the whole country on our e-commerce platform. So again, as I mentioned, the initial results are quite encouraging. 1 out of 5 customers using. And most importantly, Kasper completes tasks much faster. So 2x faster for consumers to have product to favor it, 30% faster to the basket. And those are very important metrics. The metrics that we're focused on now, they're all about trust.
So Kasper needs to perform the tasks which he is given because the trust is the most important first phase for this type of service because this service is -- it needs to be giving you the recommendations and helping you and guiding you through the process in a highly reliable and highly relevant manner. So we're quite encouraged with the Kasper's performance. In terms of the investments, we have done actually quite a lot of -- not only investments in terms of building the data center, which we did last year, the modern data center, which enables us enough compute.
And that actually results in a number which you see like 3 seconds for the response, which I think is remarkable. So he can give you highly relevant recommendation when analyzing and going across such a wide range of the products that we sell in just 3 seconds and that it can also give you some added value answers based on some of the price you actually give you. So it's not just a product listing, but things around the product like reviews, delivery times, ratings and so on and so forth.
In terms of the going forward, we are not thinking about -- I mean, if you -- first of all, if you think about our competitive advantage compared to many other companies is that we are operating in 20 million people market. So when you think about scaling this type of service in an environment when we operate on a 100 million people market, you have exponential costs associated with rolling out our service.
But we can enable in a very cost-efficient manner to actually launch the service in Kazakhstan at a reasonable cost, and that allows us to develop the product to trade the models and ensure the consumer experience is highly relevant and high quality at a very reasonable cost. We're not really talking at the moment in terms of price per tokens or anything like that because we are a transactional business. And for us, what we will measure sort of this functionality in the future is based on how much it actually costs Kasper to complete the task and cost to complete the task. The task is enable the purchase.
We're a transactional business, the reason why we have been successful historically is because we're always focused to enable the transaction. We are not just a chatbot. We're not [indiscernible] lifestyle business. We are transactional business. We enable consumers to buy, pay and shop. And everything that we do eventually results in a transaction. So that's an extremely powerful business model. It actually gives us a competitive advantage because transacting needs highly relevant information around the transaction. So the reason why the Kasper has all the ingredients to be highly accurate is because the layer of the data he operates on is extreme accuracy.
So that basically is the foundation both of our competitive advantage and also our ability to get this up and running at a very reasonable cost and the cost will be measured against the transaction, which means complete the purchase and highly scalable, which means we can deploy this technology in the future in other markets.
Maksim Nekrasov: Got it. If I may add another question on payments. And there have been some news about the national QR system. I wonder if you can comment if you saw any changes or any impact? And how should the investors think about long-term impact on the payments business and possibly take rate in the future?
Mikheil Lomtadze: Well, our take rate, as we have said before, is trending towards what is the majority of the payment transactions, and that is actually the transactions which are through our payment system and QR, which is priced around 0.95. So that's the trend we actually observed. What we have done during the last -- in the second Q, we have introduced 2 things. We have introduced Apple Pay, which we didn't have before because we thought that Apple Pay was not really necessary for the consumers if we can build much better experience ourselves locally. So we introduced Apple Pay and Google Pay.
And that introduction was driven by the fact that the ability to transact with Apple Pay and Google Pay in -- when you travel, it was something which consumers really ask us quite a lot. So we have decided to launch that service and it brought us additional payment volumes when our consumers travel abroad. So that had a positive impact. In Kazakhstan, it has -- it doesn't have -- such impacts are mostly for the international because again, our consumers -- the pain with Kaspi mobile application and this range, so we have what about -- I don't remember the exact number, but whatever, 800,000 plus/minus points where you can pay with the Kaspi mobile application.
So consumer in Kazakhstan is extremely happy and merchants are seamlessly transacting with each other through our technical capabilities, which we have built. [ Alatan ], also the same, so it performs really nicely, especially in the environment where the paper form is in high frequency sort of environment really. So has been performing really nicely. And we actually scaled [ Alatan ] across the country now during the last, what is it, 30-plus days. And then we connected to the -- we work really closely with the National Bank.
The priority of National Bank and us and all other players in the market was really to make sure that the payment system is highly scalable because of the volumes now on the market, but also highly secured. So we have really successfully worked with them during the last, I would say, 6 months, maybe plus/minus. So we really help to build the secure payment functionality. So that functionality is there and our consumers continue transacting with our merchants as well as they where they're used to and also we're getting additional volumes when everybody else is transacting with their mobile applications through our vast majority of our network -- payments network.
So now we see both our consumers and other consumers transacting to the payment network, which is accessible for everyone. So we're extremely happy that there is a wide variety of the payment methods as well from everyone and the consumers can choose and they choose -- as I described before, they can choose the most convenient option. When you're traveling, you pay with Apple Pay. When you're in Kazakhstan, you pay with the mobile application.
Operator: Our next question comes from James Friedman.
James Friedman: In your prepared remarks, you alluded to some of the growth initiatives you're anticipating for Turkey next year. Could you -- I realize now that's not the time, but next year maybe. So could you just remind us what some of those growth plans are for 2027?
Mikheil Lomtadze: Thank you. So I mean, our growth -- sort of our -- the way we operate is we're focused on things which are foundational for the merchant experience and the consumer experience. So the things which will drive growth next year and are coming through this year are really around like increase the speed of delivery. So we have increased the speed of delivery roughly about yes, quite substantially. So that actually means higher speed of delivery means better conversion rates and to the customers because they are happy with the consumer experience.
So the growth on the e-commerce side will just continue growing sort of consumer engagement, mobile app usage and all the ingredients of this, which is really about delivery and the user experience and so on and so forth. In terms of the -- something which we believe will be fueling sort of long-term growth in the fintech products. And the fintech products, we are really excited about just because that's where our experience is on the one hand. But on the other hand, consumers really don't need to buy a TV set -- sorry, they don't need a loan. They need to buy a TV set.
So once you are in e-commerce and the marketplace platform where you actually see the consumer making the actual purchases for the items, this is the best place where the buying decision is happening. So this is the best place to introduce the fintech product. So shopping loan, for example, which we have introduced a new shopping loan, which is 0.4% of GMV now. That's a new flow, which enables customers to finance their products seamlessly. And then there is a whole range of the merchant products like merchant finance and things like that, which we have done in our home market. So those would be the primary products which we will launch on the consumer and the merchant side.
But also, we will be launching the savings products because in order to fund your growth, you really need the savings, and we do have incredible simple, transparent products, which are highly popular in our home market, and those are some of the ideas which will bring and technology behind it because that's something which enables us to scale will bring into 2027. So to put it simply, there will be fintech products around consumer, helping them to fund their purchases, fintech products for the merchants so that they can actually acquire some of the inventory and then the savings product, which will enable fintech to continue to scale long term.
The fact that we have about $300 million invested into the capital actually gives us a very short start because that's the funding which we can also use in order to start scaling the fintech products next year. And then this year, we're just building up regular stuff. We just acquired the bank. So we take -- taking over operational control. So banking systems and things like that for local reporting purposes is something which we're building up. Everything else, we're very comfortable. Risk management, we already rolled out and mobile application experience, we're already building up in the shopping mall.
James Friedman: Great. And then this is the first time that I analyzed the company that we've seen rates go in your favor. And I'm just wondering how long does it take to get repriced in the market? What I mean is in terms of consumer behavior, what have you noticed historically in terms of rate changes going the other way? Yes, how durable do you think that this cycle will be?
Mikheil Lomtadze: James, I just look at inflation. If inflation continues -- inflation has been falling now for most of this year. If inflation continues to come down, national bank rates, which are very high in Kazakhstan by historical standards will continue to come down. If national bank rates continue to come down, our deposit rates will come down. You should remember that when the rates went up, we went the first player in the market to raise rates. And when rates go down, it doesn't mean we'll be -- I wouldn't expect us to be the first player in the market to lower rates. But the long-term dynamic will flow through.
I've said to investors before that any rate cuts this year just should give you increased confidence about earnings growth next year. That's the sort of time frame to think about things. But again, it's not about one cut. What you're looking to see is rate cuts inflation falling and for that to be sustained for rate cuts to fall and for that to be sustained over multiple -- over a decent period of time and exactly the same whether this has been a headwind. I mean you mentioned you've been covering us since beginning of 2024, and it's been a headwind for pretty much all of that time...
Operator: We currently have no further questions. So I'd like to hand back to David for some closing remarks.
David Ferguson: All right. So Sami, thanks very much. Thank you, everyone, for your time today. Happy to follow up offline. We are in London and New York in early September post the holiday period. So happy to follow up in person. So thanks again for your time today. Keep in touch and have a good summer. Thanks, everyone. Bye-bye.
Mikheil Lomtadze: Thank you. Bye.
Operator: This concludes today's call. We thank everyone for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.
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Kaspi.kz (KSPI) Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript was originally published by The Motley Fool