Mikhail Lomtadze is not, by his own admission, a banker. Neither is anyone who built Kaspi with him—and that, he says, is exactly the point. In 2008, he cofounded a modest financial services company in Kazakhstan. Eighteen years later, Kaspi has become one of the world’s most distinctive technology businesses: a super app serving 15 million monthly active users in a country of 20 million people. Today, it spans fintech, e-commerce, payments, travel, e-grocery, government services, and more, all in one app.
In 2025, Kaspi generated approximately $8 billion in revenue and $2 billion in net income.1 It has recently expanded into Türkiye through the acquisition of e-commerce platform Hepsiburada, taking another step toward its ambition of 100 million users.2
Lomtadze is guided by his philosophy of developing products that improve customers’ lives, stripping products to their essentials and measuring success through customer satisfaction, not financial targets.
In this Leading Asia interview, Lomtadze talks with McKinsey’s Aizhana Dostiyarova, Cheryl Lim, Joydeep Sengupta, and Jennifer Chiang about building Kaspi, why simplicity became its competitive advantage, and the leadership lessons from a crisis that tested the company.
This interview is part of the Leading Asia series, which features in-depth conversations with some of the region’s most value-creating leaders on what it takes to realize bold ambitions and take them further.
An edited transcript of the conversation follows.
Joydeep Sengupta: Welcome, Mikhail. Take us back to the beginning, when you were building a bank, but not thinking like a banker. What was the real imperative?
Mikhail Lomtadze: None of us in the company are bankers. The drive behind everything we have done is that we genuinely wanted to build a company that was unique, developed innovative services, improved people’s lives, and made our customers, friends, families, and country proud.
There was also a business logic. If technology companies could offer financial services, why couldn’t a financial services company become a technology company? Why couldn’t we provide everything that improves people’s lives through a single mobile application?
Joydeep Sengupta: That’s an ambitious mission. What kept it from becoming just words on a wall?
Mikhail Lomtadze: For us, a statement only matters if you can measure it. For every service we’ve launched, the question has been the same: What was life like before Kaspi launched this, and what is it like after? If life is not faster, cheaper, and more convenient, we have not delivered on our mission.
Almost none of our people have a KPI related to financial performance. The incentive is the quality of the service, not the bottom line. This is the architecture of how the company runs: If you don’t measure the mission, it is close to worthless.
Almost none of our people have a KPI related to financial performance. The incentive is the quality of the service, not the bottom line.
Jennifer Chiang: Kaspi has no real parallel with this range of services at this scale in a single app, in a market of just 20 million people. How did the market size shape what Kaspi has become?
Mikhail Lomtadze: It initially was a constraint that forced us to become what we are. In a market of 100 million to 200 million people, you can lose customers and still grow. In a market of 20 million, if there are half a million people who don’t like your service, you’re dead. We could never afford to lose users, so developing high-quality products and user experience became the single biggest asset.
In a market of 20 million, if there are half a million people who don’t like your service, you’re dead.
Aizhana Dostiyarova: You have launched a remarkable range of services at high speed, and the app almost never fails. How do you balance speed of innovation with quality of execution?
Mikhail Lomtadze: It’s about the way we’re organized and the product development process we’ve built. We practise what we call extreme simplification. When we think of a product or feature, we strip it back to its single-most essential element. Then we launch that, and only that.
We may know we need four more features over the next 12 months, but we choose the most important one. The others come later. The more complicated the product, the less obvious the fix when something goes wrong. But when you have one feature that fails, you can improve or remove it quickly.
Every product starts as a three-page document written in plain language. If you cannot explain a product in three pages, it’s not ready. It’s very important that you launch something that is absolutely necessary and super simple.
It’s very important that you launch something that is absolutely necessary and super simple.
Shapers and Founders
Aizhana Dostiyarova: How do you decide what gets a yes?
Mikhail Lomtadze: A new feature must increase net promoter score and reduce customer contacts or incidents. It is not intuitive; it’s tested. And there is the question of time: Can you execute this in three to six months? The longer something takes to build, the weaker the idea, and the product may no longer be relevant.
The most important question we ask is: What happens if we do nothing? If the team cannot answer that clearly, we do not need the product.
Cheryl Lim: What has unlocked this performance in your teams?
Mikhail Lomtadze: People at Kaspi are different because they genuinely care about the customer—and have the capability to act on it. We have clear ownership at every level. Caring alone means nothing.
Most of the team have been with us for about ten years. Many joined fresh out of university and now they run major product lines, data operations, risk, or marketing. They have grown with the company because the process develops people: Launch one simple feature, measure it, listen, improve, and then do it again.
We’ve built our people locally and under the pressure of a limited market. Over time, when you’re surrounded by great products, the environment becomes the teacher. That is also why we have no traditional hierarchy. Kaspi is not an easy place to work because people are constantly challenged to deliver. But the biggest reward is telling someone where you work and hearing, “Thank you for what you built.”
But the biggest reward is telling someone where you work and hearing, “Thank you for what you built.”
Joydeep Sengupta: What moment most shaped how you lead?
Mikhail Lomtadze: In 2013, when we were still mostly a financial services company, we had a deposit run. I woke up to messages saying people were queueing in front of our branches—20 to 30 percent of our customer base were demanding their money back, frightened by news of a currency devaluation.
What I remember most is not fear but how we responded. Other institutions imposed fees on withdrawals. We removed all fees, operated 24 hours a day, and every senior manager was on the street. We thought that it could be our parents, relatives, and friends in those queues, so, because it was cold, we served pizza, coffee, and tea. We chartered every plane we could find to distribute cash across the country. For three days, nobody slept.
I came away with two lessons. The first was that we needed to improve our products. If trust had been truly unshakeable, people wouldn’t have come to the branches. The crisis became a major push to accelerate. The second was that I found out what the team was really made of. When you see people go to the streets to protect customers, you know what kind of company you have built.
We thought that it could be our parents, relatives, and friends in those queues, so, because it was cold, we served pizza, coffee, and tea.
Joydeep Sengupta: What is your long-term vision, and what gives you the energy to pursue it?
Mikhail Lomtadze: When I was at Harvard Business School, I defined a vision, and what Kaspi is today is essentially that vision made real. I wanted to build a unique company that improved people’s lives. I wanted the people who worked there to be proud of it, and I wanted our relatives to be proud to use it. I was young and idealistic, and I remain idealistic.
Our long-term goal is simple: to be a company with 100 million users. We want to take what we built in Kazakhstan into places where we can make the same kind of difference, and that means new markets. Türkiye —with 80 to 90 million people—is our first major step.
I have a lot of fun; I enjoy not being the smartest person in the room.
As for energy—I don’t experience what I do as work. I have a lot of fun; I enjoy not being the smartest person in the room. The team is extraordinary and I find that exciting every single day. We work hard. I am in the office on weekends and work on vacations, but it doesn’t feel like a burden because it’s not separate from who I am.
