KSPI

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Kaspi.kz first quarter 2026 financial results. My name is Elliot, and I'll be your coordinator today. If you would like to ask a question, please press the raise hand icon if you have joined the call via Zoom. If you have joined us on the phone, please press star one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand you over to David Ferguson, Head of Investor Relations at Kaspi. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Elliot. Good morning, good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Kaspi.kz first quarter 2026 financial results call. I'm David Ferguson from Kaspi. As usual, with me on the call I've got our Co-Founder and CEO, Mikheil Lomtadze. The rest of the management team, key members of the management team, Tengiz Mosidze and Yuri Didenko, are Deputy CEOs of the company. We're going to do things a little bit differently to how we've done them in the past. For today and going forward, we're going to make the first quarter and the third quarter calls financial updates and where relevant, updates to the guidance. There's no change to today. We'll keep the full year results and the interim results for more detailed calls where Mikheil will talk about the strategy, products, other initiatives going on in the company.

I think this should be a more efficient way of doing things. Particularly, I know a lot of you have multiple companies reporting at the same time, and it should make for more interesting full year and interim results calls. On that note, I will hand over to Mikheil. He'll make a couple of introductory comments, and then I'll take you through the rest of the presentation. Mikheil, over to you.

Thank you, David. Hello, everyone. You know, we have started the year in the first quarter with a good growth and strong growth in e-Commerce, which was driven by the also higher purchasing frequency and some of the services, value-added services, showing additional monetization faster than the GMV growth itself. Our e-Commerce did grew 41% year-over-year on a constant currency and pro forma basis. Importantly, the transactions grew 43% year-over-year. Frequency of the quarterly purchases now reached 15, which is also quite a substantial growth of 44% year-over-year. We are remaining a very profitable company.

You know, we're happy that the board recommended a dividend of KZT 850 per ADS, which represents about 64% payout ratio. The general sort of message for everyone is pretty simple, that we are creating a much larger, you know, bigger, more diversified business. Now we're happy with both building on our strength of the super app, leading positions in our home market, Kazakhstan, but also, you know, creating additional growth in Türkiye. The one thing which I wanted to mention briefly that e-Commerce for us is important as I've mentioned before. You know, we are the company which is focused on the front end of the consumer and merchant relationship.

When I say front end of consumer and merchant relationship, I mean the point where the purchase and sale decision is happening. The purchase and sale decision is happening on e-Commerce, where consumers are searching, reviewing, and buying goods on the one hand, in the future with the help of the AI agents. On the other hand, you have merchants that are also creating those listings and getting additional sales. When you combine this together on top of it, you do have additional value-added services. The simplest today would be advertising and delivery value-added services, which have grown actually quite substantially, about 73% year-over-year. We remain very optimistic. We believe in the future of our company.

As you've probably been already learned that I've made a investment myself alongside with Tencent and other long-term shareholders. I remain fully aligned and true believer in the company. You know, we are really excited about some of the services we're working on. You know, hopefully during the year, as David mentioned, we'll be providing more detailed overview of some of the products we have been already launching. We'll be sharing with you how excited we are about the range of innovations which companies is launching and working on. That's, you know, pretty much everything from me at this stage. Back to you, David.

Sure. Thanks a lot, Mikheil. I'll run through the financials both at the platform, at the group level, and then up guide on the guidance. Just quickly to sort of summarize, consolidated revenue up 31% year-on-year and adjusted EBITDA up 9% year-on-year. I think the simple message, the first quarter on track with where we expected to be. On the dividend, as Mikheil said, KZT 850 a share. This is the same amount as when we brought back the dividend for the fourth quarter, and we said at the time, extrapolate the amount throughout the four quarters of this year. It's consistent with what we've said and what you can assume for forecasting purposes. At a divisional level, marketplace GMV growth of 19%. This is constant currency pro forma.

Just to remind people, we acquired Hepsiburada at the end of January. On a reported basis, it's in the numbers for three months this quarter versus approximately two months in the first quarter of last year. Pro forma constant currency gives you the true indication, the real growth in the business. Marketplace GMV up 19% on the same basis, e-Commerce GMV up 41% year-on-year. That's sort of the true rate of growth in e-Commerce. TPV up 14%, not affected to any material extent by Hepsiburada. TFV down 2%, but average loan portfolio up 23%, and I'll talk a little bit more about that later on. Moving on to the segments.

As we talked about both at the full year results and for that matter over the last 12 months, e-Commerce is one of our most important areas of focus and will be one of the main drivers of growth over the next couple of years. E-commerce GMV up 41% year-on-year. Again, constant currency pro forma like for like, driven by purchases up 43% year on year. Here again, we've spoken about the importance of driving order growth both in Kazakhstan and in Türkiye. You see the result of this or another way of looking at this, purchases for consumer on e-Commerce up from 10.4 last year to 15 this year. That's really an indication that the existing consumer base is becoming more engaged.

As we scale an engaged consumer base, it drives more opportunities for monetization around advertising, delivery, Fintech, and so on. It's the foundation of sustainable, healthy, long-term profitability in e-Commerce. That metric moving very much in the right direction and contributing to the take rate increasing up 90 basis points year on year to 15.8%. Today, around half of the GMV is coming from Kazakhstan and Turkey, so the businesses are broadly equal in size and importance, with the bulk of the marketplace business being 3P. The 1P component is coming primarily from Hepsi. Around a third of their GMV is 1P, with e-Grocery in Kazakhstan also contributing. To reinforce that point, you now see e-Commerce revenue growing faster than GMV because of take rate expansion or because of growth in value-added services.

In this case, this is advertising and delivery revenue up 73% year-on-year versus e-Commerce revenue growth up 58% year-on-year. Again, with a more engaged user base, more opportunities to drive monetization, and you see this coming through here. The revenue growth is, just to be clear, on the reported basis. If we look at marketplace growth, again, just to keep in mind, e-Commerce is around 60% of market GMV, marketplace GMV. The other 40% comes primarily from m-Commerce and to a lesser extent, travel in Kazakhstan. GMV growing at a slower rate, up 19% year-on-year, but with revenue growth up 49% and EBITDA up 12%. What we are seeing really is that that transition from offline to online retail or that transition from m-Commerce to e-Commerce is gathering momentum.

Hence, the stronger growth from e-Commerce versus overall marketplace GMV growth. Revenue up 49% for marketplace and EBITDA up 12%. On the EBITDA, that primarily reflects the inclusion of Hepsiburada for the three-month period versus two months in 2025. As you know, as we've said previously, the aim with Hepsiburada is to keep it around EBITDA breakeven this year. You've got a full three-month consolidation of a business that's around EBITDA breakeven, slightly positive, hence the slower EBITDA growth versus the revenue growth. Moving on to payments. Our payments, 15% TPV growth versus Sorry, 14% TPV growth versus the guidance of around 15%. Revenue growing at a slower rate, up 7% year-on-year as a result of take rate compression.

That is consistent with longer run trends driven by change in product mix in favor of Kaspi QR and particularly Kaspi B2B payments and overall flat EBITDA growth. Keep in mind that EBITDA excludes interest revenue. Interest revenue is around a quarter of payments revenue, and the EBITDA metric doesn't capture that. It is around a quarter of revenue, and it grew about 26% year-on-year. Overall payments is large, more mature business, but still highly profitable and highly cash generative, as well as strategically being the driver of engagement across our other businesses in Kazakhstan. Moving on to Fintech, and I'll spend a bit more time on this slide.

First of all, average net loan portfolio growth of 23% versus TFV decline of 2% and versus the guidance for the year of 5% TFV growth. We're deliberately choosing to prioritize longer duration loans that generate revenue, that generate more revenue. TFV is an indication of origination, but TFV in itself doesn't drive revenue or financials. It's average loan portfolio that drives revenue, that drives bottom line of the business. We're favoring longer duration loans which generate more revenue. You can see the duration of the portfolio is increased from 7.9 months-9.3 months. Effectively what's happening is BNPL, small ticket short duration is becoming smaller in the portfolio mix and merchant financing and the general purpose loan, which are the longer duration loans are becoming larger in the mix.

While this change is going on, you have this sort of divergence between loan portfolio growth or widening between loan portfolio growth and TFV growth. The combination of 23% loan portfolio growth with stable pricings, Fintech yield of 6% year-on-year translates into 25% revenue growth and 12% adjusted EBITDA growth year-on-year. As we've talked about for now several years, the EBITDA growth is being impacted by a higher funding costs, increased around 220 basis points year-on-year on the back of the interest rate increases in Kazakhstan last year and continues to pressure growth. If rates start to move down, and hopefully now we are at the point where rates have peaked, that will be very helpful to growth next year, profitability growth next year.

I'll also just talk a little bit on the risk metrics because I've had a lot of questions on this over the last couple of months. If you want to look at sort of understand risk in the portfolio and the dynamic, how it's changing, first and second payment default, number one, and delinquency rates are some of the best sort of real-time metrics that we can look at. First and second payment default, people who've taken a loan and immediately missed a payment. You can see that number one, the levels of default are low, 0.9% and 0.4%. That's extremely low. Number two, if you look at the trend going back to the beginning of 2023, it's broadly stable.

There can be some variation at different periods, particularly due to seasonality, but overall, it's a pretty flat chart, pretty flat line. Similarly on delinquency rates, so looking across the portfolio, people who've just missed a payment, a good indication, a good lead indicator for credit quality. Again, exactly the same sort of conclusion, 2.2%, a very low delinquency rate and again, the trend broadly stable over the last couple of years. Whilst a lot of people are focused on peers and then NPL metrics, it's also important when you look at peers to actually look at their sort of real-time risk metrics to get a true understanding of the health of the portfolio.

On the back of those comments, cost of risk, again, broadly flat year-over-year, up 10 basis points to 0.7%, versus 0.6%. On the NPL ratio, NPL ratio moving up, again, the same comments that I've made previously. As the portfolio is shifting towards lower risk merchant finance and car loan, the car loan being secured, what that means is that the probability of collection on NPLs is improving, so we keep more NPLs on the balance sheet. This ratio is effectively just the timing, driven by the timing of write-off rather than the quality of the portfolio. As we keep more loans on the balance sheet because the probability of collection is improving with a higher probability, lower NPL coverage, particularly for the car loan, which is a secured product.

Effectively this coverage ratio is just a function, the change in the coverage ratio is just a function of the change in mix of the loan portfolio in favor of lower risk products that require lower levels of coverage. As mix changes, that will determine how the NPL ratio, coverage ratio changes over time. It's not a change in the underlying coverage of a specific product necessarily. Here are the reported consolidated numbers. Revenue up 31% year-on-year, EBITDA up 9% year-on-year, and net income flat, down 1% year-on-year. Just to put a bit more color around the net income trend, there's two things that are really driving it. One, higher interest expense. I mentioned funding costs in Kazakhstan have gone up 220 basis points year-on-year.

It's funding costs actually in both Kazakhstan and Türkiye, number one. Number two, COGS. What does that mean? That is just driven by the inclusion of Hepsiburada, which has this wonky business that comes with COGS for three months versus two months previously. Thereafter, if you look at the other cost lines, yes, we're making investments into Hepsiburada. If you look at the weight of the extent to which tech and product spend or sales and marketing spend is weighing on profitability is actually relatively minor, under control, where we'd expect it to be. On the guidance, GMV around 20% for the full year on track, unchanged. Same comment for TPV, 15% on track, unchanged. On the TFV, the around 5% was trending below that currently. To some extent, it's a moot point.

The key is to drive faster revenue growth rather than necessarily to drive 5% TFV growth. Overall, that's trending to around 5%. We're on track for around 5% EBITDA growth for the year. Clearly above that in the first quarter, therefore implying slower growth in subsequent quarters, but pretty much exactly where we want to be at this point in time. On that note, let's open the call up to Q&A, please, Elliot.

Thank you. For our Q&A, if you would like to ask a question, please press the Raise Hand icon found on your screen if you've joined the call via Zoom. If you've joined us on the phone, please press star one on your telephone keypad. When preparing to ask your question, please ensure your line is unmuted locally. First question comes from Gabor Kemeny. Please state your company name and proceed with your question.

Hi there. This is Gabor Kemeny from Autonomous Research. I have a few questions. First one will be on Turkey, where your losses narrowed significantly in Q1. You are guiding us towards break-even EBITDA going forward. Can you give us a sense of what sort of losses shall we assume over 2026 in Turkey? Second one will be on the marketplace take rate, which showed a very decent increase in the first quarter. Can you give us a flavor how much seasonality did you notice there in the first quarter? What shall we model here going forward? Some guidance would be helpful. Finally, you made a point that Kazakh interest rates falling might impact your NII next year.

Can you give us some sensitivities to your funding cost and your NIM to falling Kazakh rates? Can you comment on what you actually expect, how you actually expect Kazakh rates to develop from here? Thank you.

Gabor, thanks for the questions. Maybe I'll start and then Mikheil may add some additional comments. I'll do it in reverse order. On the last one on interest rate cuts, we don't assume any interest rate cuts in the guidance this year. I think all you can do or we can do and all you can do is just look at trends in inflation data, and you can see that inflation, it appears, peaked in Kazakhstan in September and has started to fall at quite a decent rate over the last couple of months. That's an encouraging lead indicator. In terms of sensitivity, I would advise just to look at the full-year results presentation from last year because there you see the impact.

We pulled out the impact of last year's interest rate increases on the net income in Kazakhstan. I think broadly, if I remember correctly, if you look in 2025 in Kazakhstan, interest rates moving or our cost of funding moving up by somewhere between 100 basis points-150 basis points knocked around sort of 4% off the net income growth in Kazakhstan. That was all sort of set out last year, so that would be a decent proxy for you to take. On the marketplace take rate, I wouldn't say it's sort of anything to do with seasonality. It's a function of advertising and delivery, and there's been a trend over many years of growing value-added services, which has been additive to take rate.

I would just look at, again, the sort of the increase that you've seen last year year-on-year, and use that as a proxy for what you might expect to see this year. On Turkey, we guide EBITDA breakeven, at least EBITDA breakeven. We've also talked about free cash flow positive as the guardrails we're putting around this business. I wouldn't specifically comment on net income. I'd also just comment that the main focus is really driving engagement, making the investments to drive engagement on the platform, which you'll see first of all through the orders, and that's the best sort of lead indicator for the progress that we're making.

It's very clear. Thank you, David.

Thanks, Gabor. Next question, please.

We now turn to [Maxim Makarov]. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hi, Max.

Hi. Thank you for the presentation. I appreciate your comments regarding the first of all being more focused on financials, but I have to ask about Tencent recently acquiring a minority stake. How should we think about any potential strategic synergies going forward from that and whether it changes in any way your positioning the super app in Kazakhstan and Turkey? That's the first question. The second one is about the marketplace growth in Kazakhstan specifically and any updates on the smartphone situation. Has it normalized? Whether you see any impact from the current situation in the Middle East on the electronic supply.

The third one, final one is on the guidance. We saw EBITDA growth trending above the full year guidance. It's 9%. Your guidance hasn't changed. What kind of factors do you take into account when kind of maintaining the guidance? Should we expect some heavier investments in Turkey or any other reasons? Yeah. Thank you.

All right. Thanks for your questions, Max. I'll take the questions on sort of marketplace growth and guidance, and then maybe Mikheil will make a comment on both the Tencent and his own investment. Yeah, just keep in mind it's the first quarter. The first quarter is exactly where it's the smallest quarter of the year. Q4 is the most important quarter of the year. It's pretty much where we'd expect it to be. You will see in subsequent quarters, the timing of investment having more of an impact on EBITDA and the bottom line. I wouldn't get carried away. That's the first thing. On the marketplace growth, I'd say no material.

There may have been some disruption, but I'd say no material disruption as a result of what's going on in the Middle East and, or supply chain disruption. Broadly speaking, and as a very general comment, the current macro situation or the current geopolitical situation is probably more positive than negative for Kazakhstan macro, but a lot depends on how things evolve over time. That's on your second and third question. On Tencent, Mikheil, is there anything you'd like to add?

I mean, it's exciting to have such a shareholder and the team that was working on the transaction in general. We have been quite admirers of Tencent, you know, believing that Tencent is the pioneer of the super app business model. You know, let's You know, I don't really have anything specific to comment, but in general, when you look at Kaspi is the type of company which is and the team, which is really hungry for knowledge and constant development and improving and developing some of the really incredible innovative services which we always have very strong pipeline of.

I guess, you know, having this relationship with the Tencent, and, you know, some other companies, actually benefiting really us. Also we have a lot to share. There is nothing really specific at the moment which I would like to discuss on this call. Again, you should always keep in mind that you are working with the company and with the management team, which is as hungry and as ever, is constantly learning and constantly thinking, you know, what is the next breakthrough product which is going to change consumer, revolutionize actually consumer experience and the merchant experience. Having such a shareholder is a good thing for us. Thank you.

Great. Thank you so much.

We now turn to James Friedman. Please state your company name and proceed with your question.

Good evening, good morning. It's Jamie at Susquehanna. When you originally bought Hepsiburada, your observations were that the service quality was below what you are accustomed to delivering and that you needed to invest in Hepsi, especially in terms of delivery. I was wondering where you think you are in that journey now. You know, and the metrics that you use, what are you focused on? How have you improved the service, and what are your future objectives with it?

I guess I will take this call, David, right? Yeah. In terms of the, of the strategy, you know, the strategy in our understanding of the, of the word strategy is this is not the thing which you sort of turn on or off from one call to another. We did have a substantial discussion about some of the metrics we would like to bring our Turkey business towards. Those metrics are really the Kaspi's metrics, and they're related to the frequency of the consumer purchases, speed of delivery, and accessibility of the financial options on the marketplace, which again drive the GMV per consumer.

Those metrics have been improving quite nicely during last year, and we see pretty much the same trend. We retain, you know, exactly the same focus. I need to make one sort of comment that it's where we would like that we deliver the same quality of the experience in Türkiye like we do in our home market. That's our goal. It does mean that the experience currently is, I mean, is as good as other players on the market. All the investments we're doing, they are around technology.

They are around organizing the data so that it's readily available in the structure for real-time decision-making and you know, some of the models which we're currently building to enhance consumer and merchant experience. Then to deliver as quickly as possible, and deliver on the weekends or deliver on holidays, but actually deliver the items when consumers want them. If, if you think from the number perspective, this is where all the investments are going. The increase that you saw in the investments were actually around those priorities. We're quite pleased. That's what is reflected in the growth as well.

The reason why we're pleased is that these decisions which we're making and the new initiatives which we're sort of rolling out and completing on the, again, delivery, payment options, the advertising products, personalization, risk management, marketing, all those are giving the results which you see in the growth. That's what keeps us really excited for such a large market. Just to go back again to our strategic strategy is that the e-Commerce in Kazakhstan when we started our business, we started from sort of financial Fintech payments and then e-Commerce. In Turkey, we're working backwards because we actually do have very strong consumer base. We do have the strong base of the merchants, and we do have the online interaction and traffic and the engagement from both.

Now what we really need to do is we really need to roll out some of the services and technology which we have in-house and that what you actually see in some of the numbers for the first Q.

Okay, great. The engagement is increasing significantly. When you think about where that could potentially go, how do you see that traveling? I think the statistics are that the average U.S. consumer transacts e-Commerce 40x a year. I think the average Brazilian is about 10x a year. Where do you think that that will travel to over long term in Turkey, Mikheil?

Yeah. Well, I mean, Jamie, in our, in our case, our sort of benchmark is really, what we have already achieved in our home market. If you think in terms of our home market, you know, if I'm not mistaken, the numbers which we have discussed in the year-end, was it about 27 purchases per consumer? I think, in our home market, in Kazakhstan. There are about seven purchases per consumer in Türkiye. So that just gives you an understanding where what we're really focused on. Again, we're not inventing anything. We're basically taking our playbook, and we're focused, you know, on execution and making sure that technology and data supports it. So that's where our primary focus on.

Of course, this sort of engagement, you know, you are required to make some investments in order to explain your user experience, in order to market it. That's why this year is more of the, you know, I would call it an investment year. We do have our rules, which we would like to still remain a very profitable dividend-paying company. We do have guardrails for the decisions we make, but that's our focus. We want to increase the consumer engagement. We want to have the right assortment for that engagement. We want to have the right merchant base and delivery and the payment methods which support that. The difference, again, as I mentioned, around seven in Turkey and around 27 in Kazakhstan.

In Kazakhstan, growing really, really fast. It will be even bigger this year. Basically, that would be our sort of goal for Turkey.

Okay, perfect. Thank you. I'll drop back in the queue.

Thank you, James.

Now hands over to Hanzade Kilickiran. Please state your company name and proceed with your question.

Mikheil, David, thank you for the presentation. I'm Hanzade Kilickiran covering Hepsiburada at JPMorgan. If I may, I would like to ask a few questions on your strategy for Hepsi. Actually, this question has been partially answered, but you have been consuming some cash in Türkiye after stepping up in marketing campaigns in the past few quarters. This also seemed to put some pressure on the working capital outflows, I mean, particularly in this quarter, which may be, though, a seasonal shift. I wonder, how long will you continue on this strategy? Is there a specific KPI target that you would like to reach before normalizing the marketing activities? That's my first question. The second one is, we have also observed some decline in consumer financing activities in the first quarter in Türkiye.

Is this a deliberate decision like pausing on Hepsipay products before you finalize your license approval in Türkiye? The third one is that, after the initiatives that you have taken in Türkiye, like listing of the small ticket items, which you have been quite successful actually, have you achieved a more diversified GMV, GMVs per category? Thank you.

Yeah, thank you for the questions. In terms of if I got them right, but you please tell me if I miss anything. In terms of the consumer financing, and the consumer finance side, you know, we have our sort of way of really working both on the product side, but most importantly, you know, risk management. It's not only about originating consumer finance, but actually it's about originating that to the right person at the right time with the right amount, but also in the way that the people are sort of repaying you basically. When you originate the wrong consumer finance, it's not an asset, it's a liability for the company in terms of the risk.

We have been really happy with the way we have rolled out the, you know, the new risk management system. As we were rolling out the risk management system, you know, we basically slowed down the origination. If for everybody's benefit on the call, the Hepsiburada has fully owned consumer finance subsidiary. Actually, you know, we in Turkey can originate consumer loans. We wanted to get first the whole system, which, you know, Kaspi has to bring it to the to our business in Turkey and then, you know, we feel now increasingly comfortable with the opportunities to do more in the consumer finance. That's, that's on the consumer finance side. Again, we were not in a hurry.

We didn't want to originate anything above the normal course of business. We're putting together the risk systems and data management in order to do it at the extraordinary quality, which is acceptable at our level. Like we have, you know, cost of risk a bit over 2% in Kaspi, which is world-class. That's on the consumer finance side. In terms of the diversification, well, what we have done really last year is which gave us, as you said, the very strong results, is we are focused on the merchants and we've realized that if we want to promote the merchants and give them ability to sell the low-ticket items, we actually had to improve our delivery experience, but also provide the reasonable delivery fees.

That's what we have done last year. We continue doing it this year. We also roll out, you know, our data-driven logistics platform. We're actually, you know, completing this in the first Q, and that's something which with the help of our, you know, LLM and forecasting models, you know, that will give us a substantial improvement in the speed of delivery and the quality. We're quite happy with the performance, and we see the low-ticket items growing really fast, but also 3P growing faster than 1P. That's on the merchant side and low tickets. In terms of the marketing, again, we're a data-driven company, so we're not really focused on just, you know, making sort of driving the traffic in the short term.

We're not driven by the weekly targets or whatever. We're really driven by, you know, putting the system in place, which enables us to have a profitable growth in the future. From that perspective, when we do marketing, we're not solving the short-term targets. We are actually building the engine to generate the very sustainable recurring and repetitive target traffic from our consumers. Yeah, that's what we have done last year, and that's what we will continue doing this year. Our goal is simple, that the consumers that we acquire, they continue to be engaged with us and deliver value and the profits in the future. You know, initially, you really do need to invest in order for consumers to experience your products and services.

Thank you, Mikheil. Is it reasonable to say that your initial target is more like frequency focus? I mean, to take up the Turkey's frequency numbers close to Kaspi.

Our focus is engaged consumer base. An engaged consumer base comes with a frequency. Frequency is just one indicator that consumers love your products and they come back to you and shop with you frequently. Yes, you're correct.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Hanzade.

We now turn to Sergej Belozerov. Please state your company name and proceed with your question.

Hi, this is Sergej calling from Greyhound Capital. Good to see a results improvement in Turkey. I have two, three questions. One is on Rabobank. Has there been any update or is there any reason for the delay? Then on, in Kazakhstan, on the payment take rate, you mentioned already it has come down quite a bit. Is that the reason? What are the reasons behind that? Is it the shared QR code? Have we seen the worst in terms of the drop or what's the current situation and what can we expect going forward? Lastly, on Tencent, you already briefly touched on it.

I would like to understand, is it purely passive investments from Tencent or more deeper cooperation? Is there a potential that they acquire a bigger stake in your company from maybe our larger shareholders who want to sell? Thank you.

All right, Serge, thank you for your questions. I'll certainly start. Payments take rate, it's nothing to I know we've spoken before about national payment system. It's nothing to do with that. If you look at the sort of take rate decline, you look at it over the last three years, 3-5 years for that matter, I think you'd see that it's broadly consistent each year. It's largely been driven by Kaspi QR at 95 basis points and Kaspi B2B payments, which is a lower take rate product growing in share. It's purely mix mechanical. It will continue to the extent that Kaspi QR continues to outperform other payment products. I guess can't broadly be go below 95 basis points. It's kind of the floor. That's on that. On Rabobank, no update, nothing to report.

Base case remains that we hope to close the transaction over by the summer. It's kind of out of our hands. The wheels turn slowly, we continue to work and aim for closing at that point. On Tencent, I'm not sure if there's much we can add, I wouldn't wanna sort of speculate on their behalf about what they might do or might not do in the future. Maybe that, I think your question is a question for Tencent, not a question for Kaspi.

Well, perhaps just if it's pure passive investment or a deeper cooperation, maybe if you could answer that would be great.

Yeah. All right. Sorry, yeah. Fair question. It's primarily a financial investment.

Perfect. Thank you very much.

I'll turn to [Ronak Gadia]. Please state your company name and proceed with your question.

[Ronak], you might be on mute.

Hey, hey, good afternoon. hope you can hear me now. yes, this is [Ronak] from Dunross. maybe, I've got about three questions. First one, I guess, is just a follow-up from the previous caller. On the payment side, obviously the decline in take rate is understood, and you can see that in the revenue reduction. I was just trying to understand what are the factors driving the drop in EBITDA? Because you could see the EBITDA was flat on a year-on-year basis. if you could just comment on what the drivers there were. Going to the Fintech space, like you mentioned, you know, the focus is to grow the car finance and merchant loans.

Could you maybe give some guidance on what the implications of that would be in terms of on the NIMs? What are the respective lending rates for those segments vis-a-vis unsecured loans and BNPL? Then the last one, just on the recent capital that you raised, the $600 million, if you could just give some insights into how that will be deployed. Will all of that be injected into Turkey, or will there be some sort of split between Turkey and Kazakhstan? Thank you.

Thanks, [Ronak]. On the last question, the official line is general corporate purposes. What does that mean? There's no one specific big bang project, across both Kazakhstan and Turkey, there's multiple initiatives, growth initiatives. This just gives us more flexibility in how we fund those initiatives. We're pretty pleased that we were able to raise the $600 million at the 5.9% rate that we were able to do that at. More flexibility at a cost that makes a lot of sense for us. That's on that side of things. I mean, on Fintech take rate, of Fintech pricing. You should look at the trend over the last 12 months at the gross level.

It's been broadly stable. I wouldn't wanna provide guidance going forward, but I wouldn't expect it to be dramatically different to that going forward. I think there was another question that I've forgotten.

Take rate on payments. I think the, you know, take rate on payments is answer is exactly the same and quite simple, and that what something which we have said on every quarter of our results, is basically that 0.95% is the acquiring fee on the QR codes. The share of QR codes is increasing. There is about 0.5% roughly on the B2B payments, which is increasing even faster. It's a function of the faster-growing, you know, bigger numbers on the payment side. In terms of the EBITDA margin or I mean, this is like, what. 50%+ EBITDA margin business.

I mean, from that perspective, I mean, it's really a very profitable business. It's just such a huge scale that there is no really, you know, economies of scale at this stage. It's a big business. It's matured. We do are making some innovations in this field, like, you know, Kaspi Alaqan, for example, which has close, you know, to the 1 million registered users already and growing quite nicely. Again, this is a really big business which delivers profitability on the one hand, but also, most importantly, actually delivers the engagement from the consumers and merchants, which is the backbone for anything we do now.

Whether you think in terms of the e-Commerce or if you think in terms of AI technology and things like that's the big boon for, you know, future innovation. The direct monetization is nice, very important, but actually, as far as I'm concerned from 5-10 years perspective, it's secondary. What it really gives us is this huge advantage of having, you know, incredibly high-quality data, which enables us to train our models to be very precise in their decision-making.

Sure. Thanks, guys.

Thank you.

We have no further questions. I'll hand back to you, David, for any final remarks.

All right. Thanks, Elliot. Thanks everyone for your time today. Please feel free to reach out if you'd like to follow up on anything. I know we've got a few guys in Kazakhstan this week, so looking forward to seeing you. Thanks a lot, and speak soon. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Thank you. Bye-bye.

Thank you, everyone. This concludes today's webinar. You may now disconnect from the call.