Turkey Takes Center Stage in Freedom Holding’s International Strategy

Freedom Holding Corp. - a fintech ecosystem listed on NASDAQ and headquartered in Kazakhstan - takes an important step in its international expansion. It is replicating the ecosystem at full scale in Turkey, making it a major market to test scaling. The holding has already put in place the main pieces needed to build a multi-service platform in the Turkish market. The next steps include further expansion in Europe and the US.

Setup in Turkey Completed

On August 19, Freedom Yatırım Menkul Değerler A.Ş. received an operating license from Türkiye’s Capital Markets Board, allowing the company to deploy full-scale brokerage operations. Freedom Holding Corp. said it was the first broadly authorized foreign brokerage firm to receive such a license in Turkey in many years. Freedom Yatırım has already integrated with Borsa İstanbul and also plans to use the Group’s international brokerage infrastructure to connect Turkish investors with global markets.

This news came less than three weeks after Freedom completed the acquisition of 99.32% of Turkish Bank A.Ş. On July 31, the share transfer was finalized, and the bank’s shareholders approved its new name, Freedom Bank A.Ş.

Together, the bank and brokerage business lay the foundation for deploying a full-scale Freedom ecosystem in Turkey. Besides banking and brokerage, it includes other financial services (insurance, payments), as well as everyday digital services (e-grocery, travel, online ticketing, media, etc.), available to clients through a single mobile app - Freedom SuperApp.

This ecosystem model was developed and proved successful in Freedom's home market in Kazakhstan and in some neighboring Central Asian countries. Now the holding is taking it abroad, with Turkey as the first market where all the pieces are being assembled outside of the home under one local platform.

What Freedom Holding Is Taking Abroad

SuperApp is at the heart of this model. Presented to clients in April 2024, it has grown very fast. By the end of June 2026, the number of registered users had reached 6 million, while at the start, in spring 2024, it had only 107 thousand clients.

The idea is straightforward: once customers use one application for almost all their needs without building a separate relationship with each provider, satisfaction and loyalty increase, letting Freedom win on cross-sales.

The flagship SuperCard is an important part of that model. It is a multi-currency card that allows customers to hold balances in seven currencies, including the Kazakh tenge, U.S. dollar, euro, Chinese yuan, and Turkish lira. The product range also extends beyond the individual customer. One example is the Power Card, designed for children aged 5 to 18. Parents can set spending limits and restrict certain merchant categories, while the product also incorporates rewards linked to educational performance. In practical terms, that gives Freedom a way to bring younger household members into the same financial ecosystem while introducing them to basic money management.

That broader reach is important to the SuperApp model. The objective is not simply to sell more banking products. It is to give customers more reasons to return to the same platform - for payments, investments, insurance, travel, ticketing or other everyday services.

The Next Stages of Expansion

Turkey allows Freedom Holding Corp. to put that model to work outside of Kazakhstan. The holding disclosed plans to invest about $300 million in expanding its Turkish operations. The company is therefore not treating Turkey as a small overseas extension of its existing business. The market is being built as a separate regional platform, replicating the ecosystem built in Kazakhstan but adapted to local regulation, consumer behavior, and competition, making it a good test of the ecosystem's scalability.

Turkey is not the only international market where Freedom Holding is trying to reproduce its model. In June, the holding applied for a banking license in France, in addition to its already established brokerage operations in Europe, and said it planned to invest €500 million to deploy its full-scale digital ecosystem in Europe. The next step is to bring Freedom’s comprehensive travel services to the European market, including tickets, hotels, tours, and visa support.

Freedom Holding Corp. also plans to expand its presence in the United States. Freedom’s U.S. operations include a broker-dealer, while Freedom Holding Corp. trades on NASDAQ with a market capitalization of more than $11 billion as of September 23. Freedom founder and CEO Timor Turlov mentioned plans to add banking through a license application or M&A.

For now, the most concrete part of the international strategy is therefore not a single geographic endpoint, but a sequence of steps: build and test the ecosystem in Turkey as a major foreign market, extend the model into Europe and the USA, and use the group’s existing international financial infrastructure as the foundation for further expansion and growth with an ambitious goal to make it to the S&P 500. Although Freedom would need to roughly double its market capitalization to join the 500 largest publicly traded companies in the U.S., Turlov believes this is realistic.