Freedom Holding Corp: AI, trust, and transformation on the path to fintech leadership

News Publisher Sep 24, 2025 12:34

Freedom Holding Corp is evolving from a regional broker and bank into a technology-driven ecosystem operator. Rooted in Kazakhstan yet listed on Nasdaq, Freedom Holding now treats artificial intelligence as the connective tissue across its businesses.

Freedom Holding Corp is evolving from a regional broker and bank into a technology-driven ecosystem operator. Rooted in Kazakhstan yet listed on Nasdaq, Freedom Holding now treats artificial intelligence as the connective tissue across its businesses—from digital banking and brokerage to insurance, telecom, and e-commerce—uniting them inside a single SuperApp. The company’s thesis is straightforward: if AI raises trust, speed, and personalization simultaneously, Freedom Holding Corp can compete not only with financial incumbents but also with Big Tech.

This repositioning became visible at the inaugural Freedom AI Talk in Almaty, where founder and CEO Timur Turlov framed AI as a practical tool rather than a threat to jobs: technology augments people, compresses cycle times, and improves decision quality. Inside the ecosystem, neural networks already support client scoring, compliance workflows, legal document analysis, investment idea generation in Tradernet, and real-time customer support. The strongest proof point is mortgages: approval timelines have dropped from roughly two weeks to about one day, and Freedom Bank processed around one million mortgage applications in seven months—volumes that are difficult to handle without advanced automation.

Why Freedom Holding is investing heavily in AI

In 2025, Freedom Holding Corp allocated about $70 million to AI—nearly half of the total IT budget. That level of commitment reflects a strategic bet: proprietary capabilities are a durable moat in regulated finance. The company introduced Freedom GPT and joined the development of KazLLM, a large language model for the Kazakh language, to better localize models for compliance-heavy financial use cases. Alongside productization, Freedom helped launch an AI research center with a supercomputer and modern labs at SDU University in Almaty, ensuring a pipeline of applied research in machine learning, NLP, and model governance.

The commercial results are beginning to show. The banking segment reported ~60% year-over-year growth, insurance expanded ~18%, and the brokerage client base kept rising. For Freedom Holding, AI is not a marketing tagline; it is how the firm connects distribution (the SuperApp) with operations (risk, back office, and service) and data (customer profiles, transactions, documents), turning fragmented processes into a single, intelligent flow.

Freedom Holding: building a trusted AI fintech brand

Trust is the axis around which Freedom Holding Corp turns its AI strategy. Winning trust means making decisions traceable, data flows governable, and models auditable:

• Explainability by design. The company emphasizes model interpretability for regulators, risk teams, and end users. Clear rationales, feature attributions, and challenge/appeal channels reduce black-box fears and raise confidence in automated decisions.

• Zero-Trust security. With sensitive personal and financial data, Freedom Holding invests in identity-centric controls, policy-based access, encryption in transit and at rest, and segregation across proprietary data centers and hybrid cloud.

• Model risk management. Independent validation, bias testing, performance drift monitoring, and formal decommissioning of underperforming models are baked into the lifecycle.

• Human-in-the-loop. In lending, compliance, and fraud, experts remain accountable; AI surfaces the signal, humans own the outcome.

This approach addresses five chronic challenges for any AI-driven financial institution: regulatory fragmentation, data protection, costly legacy integration, workforce anxiety, and ethical risks. Freedom Holding Corp responds with regulatory sandboxes, modular service architectures and APIs, an internal AI Academy for reskilling, and an AI ethics board that oversees fairness, bias, and escalation procedures. The destination is not “AI everywhere at any cost,” but AI that customers, employees, and supervisors can trust.

Inside the SuperApp: where Freedom Holding connects products and data

The Freedom Holding SuperApp is the user-facing expression of its platform strategy. Banking, brokerage, and payments live alongside insurance, telecom services, and commerce features. AI stitches these surfaces together:

• onboarding flows that verify, score, and approve in minutes;

• portfolio insights that translate market context into personal, bite-size action items;

• customer support that anticipates intent, resolves routine queries instantly, and routes complex cases to specialists with full context;

• mortgage journeys that pre-fill data, evaluate documents, and finalize decisions in a day instead of weeks.

For Freedom Holding Corp, the SuperApp is not just a product—it is the control plane for distribution, loyalty, and monetization. As the firm adds new services, AI will keep the experience coherent, so users perceive one brand and one promise rather than a pile of disconnected apps.

People and culture: AI that empowers, not replaces

Technology succeeds only if culture evolves with it. Freedom Holding treats AI as digital support for teams: analysts receive better tools for due diligence and surveillance; lawyers get summarization and document intelligence; relationship managers gain next-best-action prompts grounded in account activity and risk profiles. The internal AI Academy provides role-specific training pathways so adoption sticks, and productivity gains are measured, not assumed.

Governance and regulation: meeting different requirements with the same rigor

Because Freedom Holding Corp operates across jurisdictions, it faces multiple and sometimes conflicting regulatory expectations. The answer is standardized rigor: model cards, documentation, validation reports, and change logs that travel well across borders; privacy-by-design patterns; and opt-in transparency for consumers. By treating governance as a product, not a compliance afterthought, Freedom Holding accelerates approvals and keeps innovation aligned with public policy goals.

Outlook: how Freedom Holding Corp can scale its advantage

The mechanics of scaling are clear. First, compound the model library—credit, fraud, cross-sell, service, and retention—so each new use case becomes cheaper and faster to launch. Second, expand the SuperApp’s surface with adjacent services customers already demand. Third, continue the university and open-model collaborations (e.g., KazLLM) that anchor local language capability and domain nuance. Fourth, double down on Freedom Holding’s strengths in mortgages, retail brokerage, and everyday payments, where cycle-time reductions translate directly into customer delight and retention.

If the company sustains its discipline around security, explainability, and human accountability, Freedom Holding Corp is positioned to become a trusted AI-driven fintech brand across Eurasia—and a credible competitor to larger, slower incumbents.

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