Kaspi, AI done right

Hello, a little update on the e-commerce, fintech and payments monopoly from Kazakhstan. Quick summary of the business if it is the first time you're hearing about it. Is is a lot like mercado libre or Grab. A super app from kazakhstan that combines e commerce, fintech, payments, flight and hotel booking, e goverment and bills. This vast ecosystem allowed Kaspi to become a near monopoly in Kazakhstan with 15M active users (all adult population) and 73 average user interactions per user per month. Kaspi hold over 70% of e commerce and over 80% of digital payments in the country. In 2025 they paused dividends to fund an acquisition of Turkish market place Hepsiburada (68% ownership). Because of the dividend pause and risk of expansion into new geographical area stock price went sideways. However, judging by most recent Hepsiburada quarterly report, there are signs of a major turn around in profitability for this company, currently masked under provisions and global costs. And when Kaspi finishes in 2026 acquisitons of rohobank and get a full bank license in Turkey, they can add other financial instruments to repeat Kaspi formula in Turkey. Btw, selling for TTM PE value of just 7, grows net income 15% and if you wonder about currency, it is volatile and tend to weaken against dollar, but in 2025 it strengthened against dollar by about 2%. Predictable future weakness of the currency is the reason why BNPL so popular in Kazakhstan and remains the most popular way major purchases are done in Kazakhstan, it is essentially a discount on the purchase as the future value of money is guaranteed to decrease. So yeah to the AI update itself. Kaspi AI has 3 major functions: 1. Payments fraud detection and credit scoring Simply improving the security and risk evaluation for their core business. 2. Marketplace recommendations and merchant value added services. Recommendations help to direct right product to the right customer. They collaborate with google and meta to gather more information on users to improve their accuracy. Which in its turn make their highly lucrative add business attractive to the merchants. Merchant value added services include product description generation, generated photo edits, pricing suggestions and inventory optimization. Helping merchants to make most of the e commerce platform. None of those are flashy Frontier AI features. They are cheap and effective. Kaspi didn't build out and even rent out massive blackwell claster to run their AI. They used open source, small scale models and prompt engineering to achieve the result.