Competition
Competition - Kaspi.kz JSC
Competitive Bottom Line
Kaspi.kz has a real, structural advantage that is not generic — three monetisation engines (Payments, Marketplace, Fintech) running on one customer base in a market it effectively owns. The advantage is overstated only in the sense that it does not export easily: in Kazakhstan Kaspi is the category, but outside Kazakhstan it has spent the last 18 months buying scale rather than building it. No listed company captures all three legs of the bundle, which is why valuation peers all distort the picture in different directions. The single competitor that matters most is Halyk Bank of Kazakhstan (HSBK) — not because it threatens Kaspi today, but because every basis point of share Halyk takes back in payments, deposits, or BNPL would compress the engine that funds the equity story. The Türkiye assets (Hepsiburada, plus the pending Rabobank A.Ş. license) are not the moat — they are the bet.
The Right Peer Set
The peer set is built from three angles because there is no single listed pure-play substitute. (1) The closest in-country competitor is Halyk Bank, the only public Kazakhstan financial institution with overlapping retail-banking + payments + digital-app exposure. (2) The most mature listed analog for the integrated payments + marketplace + credit super-app flywheel is MercadoLibre, with Nu Holdings the cleaner read-through on the consumer credit + cards + deposits flywheel. (3) Brazilian POS acquirers PagSeguro and StoneCo are the most useful comparators for Kaspi Payments take-rate and SME-merchant economics. Hepsiburada is now ~85% owned by Kaspi and is included as both a subsidiary and the Türkiye marketplace reference point. Generic financial-services screens (RELX, Waste Connections, Trip.com) thrown up by aggregators were rejected as economically unrelated.
EV is null for the banks (NU, KSPI, HSBK) because enterprise value is not a meaningful concept for deposit-funded financial institutions — deposits are operating liabilities, not debt. HEPS market cap and EV reflect Kaspi's effective ownership of a sub-$1B Turkish marketplace; the consolidated economic exposure is materially larger once integration is factored in. HSBK trades on LSE as a GDR and is reported in GBP; market cap is the USD-converted GDR-equivalent equity value.
Three facts jump off the chart. Kaspi earns the highest ROE in the peer set by a wide margin — roughly 1.6× MercadoLibre and nearly 2× Nu — because the three-engine super-app captures more value per acquired customer than any pure-play peer. It trades at the bottom of the multiple range alongside the Brazilian POS acquirers and Halyk Bank, which is a Kazakhstan country-risk multiple, not a super-app multiple. The largest single valuation dislocation in the peer set is MELI's 43.5× P/E on a 36% ROE versus Kaspi's 7.8× P/E on a 58% ROE — the structural answer is that MELI is priced for LatAm runway while KSPI is priced for Kazakhstan saturation.
Where The Company Wins
Kaspi wins where structural integration meets in-market dominance. Each advantage is measurable and traceable to a specific operating disclosure rather than a marketing claim.
The chart makes the structural point: Kaspi is the only name in the set that scores at the top of all five lines simultaneously. MELI and NU are close on integration and profitability respectively, but neither has the deposit-funded balance sheet that lets Kaspi convert payments dominance into low-cost lending. PAGS and STNE are pure payments/SME plays. Halyk has the deposit franchise and country reach but does not match Kaspi's app engagement or category-leading consumer brand.
Where Competitors Are Better
Honest competition analysis requires naming the places where Kaspi is not the strongest. Four are material.
The honest weakness is geography, not business model. Strip Kazakhstan out of the comparison and Kaspi's super-app dominates on every operating metric. Add geography back in and you get a single-country EM franchise with a re-positioning bet in Türkiye that has not yet earned its keep. That is the spread between Kaspi's 7.8× P/E and MELI's 43.5× P/E in one sentence.
Threat Map
The threats below are ranked by severity over the next 24 months — each is observable in filings or local-market data, and each maps to a specific competitor or structural shift rather than vague "competition is intense" language.
The three high-severity threats share a common feature: they all act on the Fintech leg or the Türkiye build-out — the two parts of the bundle most exposed to external variables Kaspi does not control. Halyk catch-up is the slowest-moving but the most consequential because it directly attacks the in-market moat. Trendyol vs HEPS decides whether the Türkiye bet is a re-rating catalyst or a margin drag. NIM compression is already happening and will reverse mechanically on the next NBK easing cycle — making it the most cyclical of the three.
Moat Watchpoints
These are the five measurable signals an investor should watch over the next four quarters. Each is observable from the 20-F, quarterly press releases, NBK / ARDFM filings, or Halyk's annual report. Each maps to one specific moat dimension.
The moat is real where Kaspi controls the loop and earned where Kaspi has scale. Three of the five signals above (brand recall, Halyk MAU, Cost of Risk) test the Kazakhstan moat directly; two (VAS yield, HEPS engagement) test whether the next leg of value creation arrives on schedule. If signals 1-3 stay green and 4-5 inflect upward in the next four quarters, the structural advantage is intact and the discount to MELI/NU multiples is unjustified. If signals 1-3 start to converge with Halyk and 4-5 stall, the multiple discount becomes the right answer.