EXCLUSIVE: “Smart Moves” – Renat Tukanov, Freedom Holding Corp in ‘The Paytech Magazine’

2026 looks to be a key year for Freedom Holding Corp, a global fintech conglomerate with major presence in Kazakhstan that’s betting big on banking ecosystems

When ecosystems work well, there’s balance, harmony and mutual growth. When they don’t, there’s tension, disunity and stagnation. No one understands that better than Renat Tukanov, Group Chief Technology Officer for Freedom Holding Corp (FRHC), who says his job is to build bridges between people as much as between machines; to promote not just digital integration, but also cultural coalescence.

“Why do projects fail? It’s all about the culture,” says Tukanov. “Eventually, the challenge is not to build the technical part, but to build the human part to make people communicate with each other, work with each other.”

Freedom Holding Corp is the financial services group built by Timur Turlov. Born in Russia, his business career and the growth of FHRC have been defined by its expansion across Central Asia, and later in Europe and the US. He transformed a small brokerage operation into a diversified international ecosystem listed in the US on Nasdaq.

By the time FRHC began attracting global attention, Turlov was already leading a sizeable fintech empire spanning more than 20 countries, anchored by the largest business in Kazakhstan – the country that would become the group’s strategic market and has become Turlov’s home. He hadn’t been born into privilege, and Turlov’s path to becoming a multi-billionaire, now leading the most valuable, non-state-owned company in the largest of the so-called Central Asian ‘Stans’, wasn’t linear.

But in amassing brokerage, banking, insurance, telecoms and ecommerce companies under FHRC, operating more than 20 businesses in 22 countries, he became expert at building ecosystems, both inside and out. Perhaps the best example of that is the Freedom SuperApp launched by the Corp’s Freedom Bank in Kazakhstan in April 2024. As of October 2025, it had 1.6 million active monthly users and was the most downloaded app that year.

“The Freedom SuperApp is one of the key activators of the ecosystem,” says Tukanov. “It collects a customer’s fragmented digital experiences into one. So you don’t have to keep in your memory ‘what was the account, what was the password?’. In that way, there is less decision fatigue.”

It demonstrates what Freedom’s founder believes is the inevitable convergence between banking and telecoms. In this symbiotic relationship, the former has the advantage of long customer retention cycles while the latter enjoys low acquisition costs.

Each benefits from keeping customers in the same ecosystem, which is ultimately defined, says Turlov, as ‘a true set of rails for communication between people’. The Freedom SuperApp brings together the services its banking customers use multiple times a day, such as payments, with others that are less frequently accessed (brokerage, investments, insurance). It also plugs users into the largest online grocery platform in Kazakhstan, Arbuz.kz, which is owned by Freedom; Freedom Ticketon, its ticketing platform; and its flight aggregator, Aviata.

And all these can be accessed via one login, with payment credentials automatically and securely retrieved, while permissioned integrations with government departments allow for one-click ID checks. Turlov told an audience in Dubai in December 2025 that a financial ecosystem is more powerful than individual products. But it relies, of course, on a technology infrastructure that can handle the data calls. And it’s an advantage if you also have control over that architecture. In Kazakhstan, at least, Freedom does. Through Freedom Telecom, the Group is expanding Freedom Cloud Kazakhstan to improve the nation’s digital sovereignty to support not just financial services, which were running out of processing space, but also government services.

At the same time, Freedom Holding Corp is reducing its reliance on external technology providers, instead developing in-house solutions.

“The logic is pretty simple,” says Tukanov. “Everything that is connected with the core of our business should be developed in-house, because it’s our technology foundation. That’s why we cannot rely on somebody else, because eventually, from this foundation, we are rising up, developing products that bring value to our clients. The core systems we’re replacing; for non-core, we’re relying on other vendors.

“We’re not at the same scale, but AWS and Google replaced all the core systems with their own. I think it’s always the same path for technology companies, so as not to have vendor lock-in.”

Turlov said that, in his opinion, it is ‘impossible to be a true digital bank if you don’t control your own core… now our goal is full control over card processing and the core banking system’.

It’s a big strategic play. But then Turlov is a supreme strategist, an accomplished chess player who is so passionate about the game that he took over the Kazakhstan Chess Federation in 2023.

A global player

While his opening gambit, back in 2011, was to become the first Kazakhstan brokerage to give local investors access to US stock markets, today it’s a significant player in many of the countries of Central Asia, and active in the EU and the US. Turlov now tends to describe Kazakhstan as a laboratory for experimenting with products and business models that could be applied elsewhere. Freedom Holding Corp listed on NASDAQ in 2019, becoming the first financial investment company from Kazakhstan and Central Asia to join a US bourse. It is incorporated in the States, where it conducts brokerage operations as an agency broker on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

Under the Freedom Capital Markets brand, the company also offers investment banking services, including participation in the syndication of both primary and secondary offerings, while actively expanding its capabilities in market research. Now, it hopes to build a successful fintech in the US, too. Freedom might find the competition harder in the States on many levels. The superapp challenge was thrown down in April 2025 when US payments company Bolt launched its own, combining one-click payments with crypto and an AI-powered shopping agent that users can send on a buying spree across its integrated ecommerce site, the app then tracks users’ purchases.

On the subject of AI, Tukanov says: “What we see now [with AI] is somewhere close to what has happened with other technologies. Yes, the internet changed the world, but the internet didn’t replace the world. So, there shouldn’t be AI in each and every part of our lives and work.

“There is a question around the trillion dollars of investments in AI. Will they ever get their ROI or not? In each and every business case we look at, we are trying to find the value – something that the customer will buy, or can use to simplify their life.

With the SuperApp, a [AI] voice assistant will help perform routine operations that you don’t want to do – press, find, etc. But in other cases, we should always look hard at what value AI will bring.”

The arrival of the SuperApp unsettled Freedom’s internal ecosystem equilibrium. That was to be expected, says Tukanov.

“When any standalone application is going into the SuperApp, there are multiple things it needs to be compliant with. That, of course, changes our process, and we have to adapt to that. That’s the challenge. You have to adapt each and every time to a changing environment, to the changing processes. And, of course, when people disagree, even within the same group, you try to solve that. As I said, my role is building bridges.”

The respected Graduate Business School of Stanford University in the US recently published a study, Freedom Holding Corp, Building An Ecosystem As A Path To Scale, in which it looked at what it believed were the company’s strategic options: doubling down on what it has built in Kazakhstan to dominate the market there; scaling horizontally in its existing territories; or pulling out the stops and expanding into new markets.

In January 2026, Freedom Telecom International signed a MoU with e&, an Abu Dhabi-based global technology and investment conglomerate. A few weeks earlier, it inked agreements with multiple partners in Japan, including one to establish a joint venture for fintech-based services, another to develop financial technology and ecosystem services, and a third to expand its ecommerce offer with Japanese goods.

In November 2025, Freedom Holding Corp, in collaboration with NVIDIA and Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development, announced a $2billion Sovereign AI Hub project powered by advanced NVIDIA AI infrastructure and designed to position Kazakhstan as a regional leader in AI.

Always one move ahead, it looks like Turlov had already read the board and is working towards the endgame.

This article was published in The Paytech Magazine Issue #18, Page 08-09

The post EXCLUSIVE: “Smart Moves” – Renat Tukanov, Freedom Holding Corp in ‘The Paytech Magazine’ appeared first on FF News | Fintech Finance.