On day one of the 19th edition of the Telecom Review Leaders’ Summit, held under the theme ‘Tech Intelligence Beyond Mobility’ from 10–11 December 2025 in Dubai, UAE, a fireside chat took place between Timur Turlov, Board Member and CEO of Freedom Holding Corp., and Toni Eid, Founder of Telecom Review Group and CEO of Trace Media International.
“Freedom Telecom was started in 2008 as just a digital brokerage firm providing access to global stock markets for customers in Central Asia. But then we realized how the digital ecosystem was transforming the financial market into a consumer market,” explained Turlov.
This early insight pushed the company to expand beyond brokerage and build a full financial ecosystem. Today, its digital bank operates alongside a digital insurance platform, a digital brokerage interface, and an investment banking platform. This marked a clear shift: a financial ecosystem is far more powerful than isolated financial products.
From there, the vision broadened. The company recognized that an ecosystem fully integrated with government services, e-commerce, lifestyle offerings, and finance would eventually outperform most standalone businesses. In Kazakhstan, this strategy has already proven itself. The company’s super app became the most downloaded application of 2025, driven by its breadth of services and seamless user experience.
According to Turlov, the ecosystem is no longer just a collection of products; “it’s becoming a true set of rails for communication between people.”
The platform enables individuals to access goods and services while managing their finances in one place. With verified user data already in the system, many traditionally separate processes become frictionless. “If you did your KYC once for the bank,” he explained, “There’s no problem providing access for telecom. It’s not a problem to issue your debit card and SIM card together, and offer financing for your new iPhone, while also providing insurance for the phone and even the card.”
However, Turlov emphasized that software alone cannot sustain such an ecosystem. Building digital rails requires physical ones as well. Freedom Telecom invested heavily in infrastructure, most notably, data centers, becoming the second-largest data center operator in Kazakhstan.
Each digital ecosystem requires connectivity and compute,” he said. “To support interactions between merchants, customers, and the government, we need a comprehensive hardware foundation.
These investments have strengthened the company’s ability to launch new business models. With an application that already has strong daily active engagement, high cost-efficiency, and loyal users, introducing complementary services becomes significantly easier. A single onboarding process now unlocks banking, telecom, travel SIMs, insurance products, and more, all within one platform.
Kazakhstan’s Digital Testbed
When asked about the future of the telecom and fintech sectors, Turlov explained that the boundaries between telecom and fintech are disappearing. In his words, “all of us need banking, and all of us need connectivity at the same time,” making their convergence inevitable. The smartphone, he added, has become the single most indispensable object of modern life. If the process of acquiring a new device is trusted, convenient, and linked to financial tools, such as installments and digital banking, the combined ecosystem becomes extraordinarily powerful.
Telcos traditionally enjoy lower customer acquisition costs, while banks benefit from far longer retention cycles. Freedom Telecom’s model merges both advantages. “You may change your operator once a year, but a banking relationship can last for decades,” he explained. Integrating these services creates multiple reasons for customers to remain within the ecosystem.
He described Kazakhstan as an ideal “laboratory,” a place where the company can test hypotheses, refine products, and generate insights that may be valuable outside the country. The goal is not only to scale successful cases abroad, but to rethink market competition. Rather than reacting to rival price changes, a company can reshape the customer relationship through technology, new retention mechanisms, and lower acquisition costs, “borrowing retention from banking and acquisition from telecom.”
When asked whether the company’s technology is flexible enough to expand internationally, he was confident. Regulation differs by market, he acknowledged, but the fundamental technologies are similar. “All of us still need KYC procedures,” he pointed out, along with common standards such as eSIM, SIM-card management, and global payment systems like Visa and Mastercard. While adapting billing or banking software to a new country takes time, he believes it is entirely feasible.
Freedom Telecom: Building the Rails of a Fully Integrated Digital Ecosystem
