Born in Moscow in 1987 in Lobnya, not far from Sheremetyevo Airport, Timur Turlov grew up without his biological father in a struggling middle class family that was plunged into the chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Those were chaotic years for all Russians. The superpower collapsed almost overnight taking the economy with it. It instilled a hunger for stability and comfort in the young Turlov that later propelled him into business. Today, at 37 years old, he is the richest man in Kazakhstan. He boasts a new home, worth $7.6bn according to Forbes, and he is the majority owner of Freedom Holding Corp (FRHC), a New York-listed bank and fund manager.

You could dub him a third-generation oligarch that emerged after Boris Yeltsin's decades of chaos. But Turlov’s fortune was made honestly, unlike the ill-gotten gains of most of his predecessors. It was built without government connections or from the privatising of state-owned assets. It was earned simply from hard work and dogged determination. Turlov, you might say, is among the first generation of true post-Soviet normal businessmen who have capitalised on markets that remain full of opportunity.

The Yeltsin-era chaos

Turlov was three when his father disappeared. He says he has faint memories of him buying him toys as a young boy before he inexplicably disappeared completely. To this day the family has no idea what happened to him and he remains on the official missing persons list.

"We don't know what happened. He just went out the door one day and didn't come back. He is officially lost," Turlov said, adding that he was not even sure what his father did for a living in those chaotic years. "Some sort of trading, I think. That was 1991. Those were crazy times. Everybody was trying to survive… We always had some shortage of money, shortage of everything. My actual dream was finally to start to make more money.”

The family was not starving, but like for everyone in those years, life became a scramble to just get by. The currency collapsed and what little savings anyone had put aside were hyperinflated away in less than a year.

But there were some benefits too. After the Iron Curtain came down, western products flooded into a curious Russian market: hour-long queues formed outside a store called Diana across from the Kremlin when it put Levi’s jeans on sale; babushki trying to get by on almost non-existent pensions would sell individual Marlboro cigarettes on street corners; and others peddled pedigree puppies in the underpasses of Novi Arbat, one of Moscow’s main thoroughfares.

Turlov had a particular passion for Hollywood films that showed the comfort and prosperity that capitalism could produce. Get-rich-quick Wall Street movies introduced him to the idea of American stock markets, a passion he has retained all his working life.

“I don't remember exactly what stories inspired me most. But it was like a kind of stamp:  usually people, most wealthy people, in Hollywood movies did something with the stock market. That was probably strongly associated with the wealth in my mind,” said Turlov in an exclusive interview with bne IntelliNews in Dusseldorf, where he was passing through on business.

One movie that did stick was “Home Alone”. Turlov says the large comfortable suburban house in the film made a big impression on him. “No one had a home like that in Moscow," said Turlov. “It was such a huge contrast between our life in a small apartment, six people in one room, I don't know, less than 30 square metres for my family, and all that American life when everyone, every family had a couple of cars, big house, all that stuff.”

First job

Turlov was hungry for change. His dreams started to come true at the age of 16 when he got an intern’s job at US firm World Capital Investments (WCI) that was set up in Moscow at the start of the 1990s. He would go to school in the mornings and from late afternoon work until midnight as a part-time junior trader working while the New York Stock Exchange was open.

“I actually opened my first brokerage account when my friend shared his personal experience with me of trading on the Russian stock market. I was 14 or 15 years old with about $800,” Turlov relates, recalling how he invested some money he inherited from his grandfather. “I never made money from that and soon lost most of my capital quickly.”

After he passed an IQ test, the American firm gave him his first contact with US equity markets and an education in how they worked. The company had a simple strategy: retail investors buying less than 1,000 shares could get instant access liquidity on the order book. That gave their brokers a tiny time advantage over the bigger orders which needed to be processed. Turlov and his colleagues were able to use this sliver of a delta to make a modest, but predictable, margin.

“It was high frequency trading before it became algo-based,” he explained. “And we had that advantage to get much faster execution for small investors in front of large institutional orders. Because usually these large orders started to increase in price we were able to resell the stock, I don't know, five minutes later, three minutes later with some almost guaranteed profit… The advantage of doing this work, it makes you familiar with the workings of the whole US Stock Exchange.”

Uniastrum Bank and the 2008 crash

After finishing school, Turlov joined the brokerage arm of Uniastrum Bank two years later in 2005. Once again, his job was to focus on the US market, helping to build access for clients to its stock exchanges, a job he did until the 2008 global credit crunch brought everything crashing down, including his bank.

Uniastrum Bank was one of a raft of banks that flourished in the noughties after Russian President Vladimir Putin ended the instability of the Yeltsin years and Russia began to boom. The bank built a business that focused on money transfers to other countries of the CIS, but quickly diversified and even had former British Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont on its board of directors at one point.

Uniastrum closed a deal to sell an 80% stake to the Bank of Cyprus at the end of October 2008. Quite a big commercial and retail bank at the time, with asset management and brokerage businesses, it had a huge position in Russian junk bonds, and underwriting. That is what killed the bank off dead when the world’s financial system went into meltdown.

“They built a very large leverage position with Russian junk bonds and in some moments they became extremely liquid,” says Turlov. “But as the crisis hit, a wave of defaults hit the market and refinancing disappeared almost simultaneously as the international money market funds started to withdraw money from emerging markets. Our bank was left with huge liabilities it had no way of covering. Our department, trading on US markets, was still healthy and in profit. We were not affected by the crisis. But everyone was sacked anyway.”

Turlov was 21 years old. He had just graduated from university and got married shortly after. He was the youngest manager in the bank and now he was an unemployed banker in the smoke and ashes of a market that would take five years to get back on its feet.

Freedom Finance founded

Turlov is a chess player – literally. He grew up with a love of the game and says all six of his children can play. He took over the Kazakhstan Chess Federation in 2023 and has begun to organise tournaments in the green and leafy Kazakh commercial capital Almaty. Last year, Kazakhstan hosted a FIDE (Fédération Internationale des Échecs) World Chess Championship for the first time in its history. Freedom Holding Corp also brought the FIDE world rapid and blitz chess championships to Wall Street last year, as bne IntelliNews reported at the time.

Chess is all about seeing openings and making bold moves with a long-term plan of attack. Sacrifices and taking risks are at the heart of the game and Turlov has built his career on similar principles. The Russian banking sector had collapsed, but Turlov’s department was making money until the last day of operation. Despite the financial shockwaves, nothing had changed in the business he knew best. Most of the pieces in the game had been knocked over, but a queen still stood on the board.

“At that time, it was not so easy to find a new job,” Turlov recalls. “My idea was just to continue to do business, which we did in a bank, and to create our own boutique firm to continue to service customers, based on our existing customer relationships.”

Turlov and his colleagues pooled their severance pay and set up FRHC to do the same business they had just been doing. Together they raised about $100,000 and opened a shop. The modus operandi of the company was to provide Russians with access to Turlov’s beloved US stock markets.

At Uniastrum, Turlov had been involved in everything. He says he knew every single operation in accounting, corresponding relationship risk, sales, trading, customer service, marketing and customer education.

“It was like a startup inside the bank, and it finally turned into this kind of spin-off when I just collected my first team of six people, and we tried to replicate all that business outside of the bank,” he reflects.

But it was hard work. The way Turlov describes it, it appears to have been similar to another scene in one of those Hollywood rags-to-riches movies he loves so much, The Wolf of Wall Street, where the main character Jordan Belfort joins a small team of salesmen in a rundown office selling penny shares to retail investors, working the phones to bring in orders.

“We actually did it successfully, but then we also realised that it's a big difference to sell these services, being part of a relatively big bank, and for a completely no-name firm. It was a very tough start,” says Turlov.

It took years to get established. The FRHC partners hired a cheap office but they were not on to an entirely crazy idea. The Russian economy was in chaos and badly burned by the crash, Russians were looking for safe havens for what assets and money they had left. Putting them into US stocks looked a lot more appealing than investing into dodgy Russian state treasury bills or the highly volatile Russian equity market.

“We started with the customers of the same bank, the same people, and said, let's make money together! But it was hard because it took a lot of time to convince them,” says Turlov. “We convinced much fewer customers than we had expected to – at first a couple of dozen customers, who invested a few tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars… I think we built one of the most efficient cold calling sales departments, just like in American movies, calling people, offering them opportunities to invest in the US stock market.”

Turlov would spend his days meeting with customers; just regular people in the street who had a job or some business but had 10 grand to spare.

“Yeah, and the average account was like $20,000,” recalls Turlov. “I think I started to make money in the spring of 2009.”

The first “office” was in the Regius Business Center in Taganskaya – actually a single room in the modern complex – in eastern Moscow and a sort of financial district for the city as many banks had chosen offices there. But FRHC had to move to cheaper premises in 2009 as it was too expensive.

“Frankly speaking it was extremely hard to impress anyone with our offices for at least the first five years,” says Turlov bluntly. It took another eight years until the firm had its first respectable offices on Olympiyskiy Prospekt in the heart of Moscow in 2016.

Turlov took all the profits and reinvested them in the business – a principle he continues to follow today, even with an Ebitda in the hundreds of millions of dollars; operating costs continue to nearly match revenues as he is constantly investing in new directions and ideas.

Foreign stocks via the SBPX

After nearly seven years of interest rate cuts, the real effective rate of return on bank deposits fell to almost nothing, prompting Russian retail investors to start looking for new investments that paid a better return. Many moved into equities.

In 2021, Russian retail investors were flocking to the stock market again for the first time since 1996, when mutual funds (known as PIFs in Russian) and retail investor trading already made up some 40% of the turnover on the Moscow Exchange (MOEX). Investment into foreign listed stocks proved especially popular, mainly on the SPB Exchange, which listed its own shares on its own exchange the same year in a highly anticipated IPO.

“We were one of the first participants at the St Petersburg Stock Exchange. We helped them a lot with the technological setup, with relationships, with executions of trades. And I think in 2021 we were the largest broker by facilitating brokerage turnover on US markets especially,” says Turlov.

By this point, Turlov was the acknowledged expert on the US stock market and FRHC was one of SPBX’s major advisors and shareholders. But following the February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the exchange’s business was effectively destroyed overnight.

“I was talking to them in 2020 and 2021 and they'd made a whole business out of selling US stocks to Russian retail investors. It was growing really fast,” says Turlov. “So, I wasn't a key partner for the exchange for a long period of time, but we helped them to build the exchange finally in 2019 and they began to talk about an IPO. The Russians themselves were starting to invest for the first time in foreign shares to diversify away from Russia.”

Move to Kazakhstan

Long before the war in Ukraine broke out or SBPX listed its shares, Turlov had already moved to Kazakhstan looking for new opportunities. By 2011, Freedom Finance’s business had grown and was established, but Turlov was frustrated. It was not a real stand-out in an increasingly competitive market. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s election in 2000 transformed Russia and ended the disarray of the Yeltsin era. The economy was stable. Incomes were growing. But there was a lot of competition in the banking and fund management sector during the subsequent boom years.

Turlov started casting around for something special, a market or niche he could dominate, and, at the recommendation of a friend, he went on a trip to Kazakhstan.

“My father was born in the Kazakh city of Shymkent, but I had never visited Kazakhstan before. A friend recommended it to me, and I fell in love with it,” says Turlov.

“In that period of time I could see that actually we were not much more competitive than most of our competitors. They were better known, much more reputable, had much better IT solutions, much better people, and a longer history of operations,” says Turlov. “I had no idea how to compete with them. I tried to look for some free niche, maybe in other regions of Russia, or somewhere else completely, where we could be more competitive, where the competition would be less. One of my friends advised me to go to Kazakhstan and talk to some people there.”

The oil-rich Central Asian republic is by far the most successful of the five so-called Stans. For a long time it had a GDP per capita that was slightly less than that of Russia’s as the number two economy of the 15 independent republics that emerged from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) –but in August, Kazakhstan’s GDP per capita pulled ahead of Russia’s for the first time ever.

After months of negotiation and then cold calling with his wife to ask companies if they were up for sale, Turlov tied up with local brokerage firm Amat Finance in a non-cash deal. Within a year, the business in Kazakhstan was up and running, selling access to US stocks to retail investors, and Turlov moved his family to Almaty, where he has been living with his wife and six children for the last 10 years.

The first snag he ran into was when the regulator nixed his licence in May 2011 only months after he closed his deal. “I was a bit frustrated about that,” he says wryly. But the irrepressible Turlov opened a branch of his Russian business and kept going, later buying another brokerage, Seven Rivers Capital in 2012.

In 2015, he acquired a small local bank, the Russian Bank for Regional Development (VBRR), for $8mn – the minimum possible capital for a bank. It was an affiliate of the giant Russian oil company Rosneft. The move gave Turlov a Kazakh banking licence and he focused on growing the business.

Turlov bought some more broker-dealers and opened 50 branches across the country. Today he trades in Kazakhstan as Joint Stock Company Freedom Finance. It was one of the main brokerages in the government’s flagship “People’s IPO” in 2014, run via the sovereign wealth fund Samruk-Kazyna to sell stakes in large state-owned enterprises to citizens, and it is the country’s top broker-dealer.

After Russia's invasion of its neighbour three and a half years ago, dozens of top managers from Freedom relocated from Moscow to Kazakhstan where the epicentre of the business now is.

The Ukraine disaster hurt FRHC as it had also built up a Ukrainian business with the acquisition of NetTrader in 2016-2017. It had grown to become the biggest broker-dealer in that market by 2022. Both Freedom Finance and Turlov were sanctioned by Ukraine in December 2022 for their links to Russia. That could have become a problem for the businesses in other markets, including the US.

Kazakhstan has turned into a fertile market. The Kazakh capital markets have made a lot of progress since the government launched Astana International Exchange (AIX) in 2017, which operates out of the Astana International Financial Centre (AIFC). The plan has been to become a regional platform modelled after Dubai’s DIFC and Singapore to allow companies to raise capital. The AIX is one of the few exchanges in the FSU that has already been hooked into the international payment and settlements system of Clearstream. Using English common law with a dedicated court, staffed by English judges, and Nasdaq’s trading technology IT system, the exchange is one of the most modern and advanced in the whole former Soviet space.

After the war in Ukraine started, the Russian market was dead to FRHC. By February 2023, Freedom completed the sale of its Russian assets for a reported $140mn. It has since "completely ceased doing business in Russia". In June 2022, Turlov renounced his Russian citizenship and became a citizen of Kazakhstan.

“I was born in Russia and spent a lot of my life in Russia, but I spent most of my life building bridges; bridges between the United States market, European market and markets in Central Asia and Eastern Europe,” he explains. “I realised that everything which we built doesn't align any more with Russian strategy. I had too many friends in Ukraine and was shocked by this war. I definitely don't want to be part of all of that, what happens in Russia. And I want to continue to build bridges, not to explode them.”

“I don’t understand what Putin wants, what he is doing,” Turlov adds. “Frankly speaking I never believed that this war would happen… It's not good for investment bankers not to know your market and the logic of key decision makers. I don't understand their logic. I don't share this logic. This logic looks irrational to me but looks very rational to them. It means you don’t know what is going to happen. And that is a risk, a business risk… It's better not to be exposed to markets which you don't understand.”

Nasdaq listing

The icing on the cake arrived when FRHC listed in New York on the Nasdaq exchange in 2019. It became the first financial investment company from Russia and Central Asia to be listed on a US bourse.

Freedom in 2015 began the process of a reverse merger with BMB Munai, a former Kazakh public oil and gas exploration company incorporated in Nevada. By then, BMB Munai was a shell corporation, having sold off its interests to a Hong Kong company.

Turlov says a mutual friend introduced him to BMB Mumbai president Askar Tashtitov, who “invited” him to go through the process of buying the shell and relisting it on a US stock exchange. (Tashtitov now serves as president of Freedom Holding.) After years of paperwork, legal footwork and multiple rounds of fundraising, Freedom Holding made its Nasdaq debut on October 16, 2019. Freedom’s shares are traded on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol FRHC.

On the day of the listing, Turlov stood on the platform of the exchange and rang the bell to start the trading of his company. The childhood dream of the Wall Street movie fan from a cramped apartment in a run-down Moscow suburb had come true.

After the Freedom Holding Corp IPO on the Nasdaq, a first for a Kazakh-based financial investment company, Turlov became a billionaire. 

Playing with the big boys

For a professional who had specialised in understanding US stocks throughout his career, actually becoming listed in New York was as much a prestige move as a business move. But now Turlov had to deal with the rough and tumble of playing with the big boys, under the full scrutiny of the Street and the western press.

As of January 2021 the company had its own seat on the New York Stock Exchange, thanks to the $2.5mn acquisition of broker-dealer Prime Executions. That came with a Manhattan office at 40 Wall Street—a building owned by Donald Trump, right around the corner from the NYSE. Turlov has previously expressed open admiration for Trump. He even once kept a life-sized cutout of Trump in his Almaty office.

The year of 2021 was to prove a boom year for the company. The IPO surge lifted all boats, instantly swelling Turlov’s personal wealth, who continues to own 69% of the stock. Shares in the Nasdaq-listed brokerage firm rose a meteoric 200% in the year, enough to secure Turlov a spot on the Forbes’ list of the world’s billionaires. He ranked No.1,517, with an estimated net worth of $2.1bn, by the close of 2021.

Turlov lately overtook Vyacheslav Kim, co-owner of Kazakh fintech giant Kaspi.kz, to become Kazakhstan’s wealthiest individual. Forbes reported the switch at the top of the ranking on May 14. Turlov has also moved into the top 500 billionaires worldwide. That update to his ranking followed a surge in FRHC’s share price, which propelled Turlov’s net worth to $7.2bn, narrowly ahead of Kim’s $7.1bn.

The Nasdaq listing was a feather in Turlov’s cap, but it also brought problems. A public listing means lots of beneficial scrutiny, but it also brings attacks. And FRHCs’ FSU origins perhaps attracted more attention than what most listed companies receive from the market’s biggest short-sellers.

Hindenburg Research, an aggressive research firm that has tussled with iconic tycoons such as Carl Icahn and Gautam Adani, released a report entitled “Freedom Holding Corp: Brazen Sanctions Evasion, Hallmarks Of Fabricated Revenue and Risky Bets with Commingled Customer Funds”. The report was published two years after the IPO. It temporality hit the FRHC stock price and raised some eyebrows.

The allegations were based on an interview with one disgruntled former employee, who worked at the brokerage for less than a year, Turlov told bne IntelliNews.

At the heart of the allegations was a Belizean entity, FFIN Belize Brokerage Services, privately owned by Freedom’s CEO. The firm was making use of it for clearing trades. Filings with the SEC show that the entity represented 60% of Freedom’s annual fee and commission income. FFIN Belize was set up just months after the US sanctioned Russia in 2014.

Turlov defended FFIN Belize, explaining that at the time there were no sanctions on investing in the Russian stock market, or on Russians investing in the US market. Indeed, as bne IntelliNews reported at the time, the SPBX business was flourishing and fully focused on enabling Russian retail investors to take a punt on US blue chip stocks. Literally billions of dollars were flowing through the SPBX into the US capital markets. They had to get there somehow. Despite a decade and a half of growth, Moscow had only been hooked into Clearstream less than two years earlier and was in the middle of significant capital market reforms to improve its connectivity with the global financial system.

“We started this company in 2014 even a bit earlier just because it was the simplest way to provide access to US markets to retail people,” Turlov said. “We asked the lawyers, and they said that it was very cheap and easy to set up a company in Belize – it took a month and cost a few tens of thousands of dollars… Things have changed since then.”

FFIN Belize was a brokerage that legally processed US trades for Freedom Holding’s Kazakh and Russian clients and accounted for 70% of Freedom’s earned commission fees from stock trades in the first half of the 2021 fiscal year, according to S&P. The set-up in an offshore tax haven was not exactly usual for a NYSE-listed brokerage, but then again neither were FRHCs markets of operation.

Turlov claims that he was simply routing US stock trades through the Belize-based entity because, at the time, Kazakh regulators didn’t allow his company to perform electronic market trading within their country’s borders. Kazakhstan didn’t join Clearstream until 2018. It was also very early days for the AIFC, which was only established a year before FRHC’s listing in New York, and the AIX was only hooked into Clearstream in November 2020.

“Was it a significant scandal? It knocked 3% off our share price for a short while and it was very stressful, but it didn’t disrupt our fundamental business,” says Turlov. “Our credit ratings were never lowered or put on a negative outlook by the likes of S&P, etcetera. Finally our credit rating is much higher than it was then.”

Super superapp

FRHC is transforming from its origins as an online US stock shop for Russian punters into a diversified financial and lifestyle ecosystem that is changing life in Kazakhstan and further afield. Traditional retail banking, brokerage and fintech services are giving away to the whole gamut of things people need to manage their entire life, not just their money, says Turlov, while enthusiastically showing bne IntelliNews the range of services on FRHC’s superapp on his phone in a Dusseldorf upmarket restaurant.

“We're going through this very big digital transformation and all the competition in Kazakh markets now, in my opinion, is just about different superapps,” says Turlov. “It's definitely not between standalone companies. It's not between offline and online. It's just between ecosystems.”

The superapp contains the usual deposit and credit card accounts, as well as a section dealing with things like utility payments and other regular costs. FRHC now sells more than 50% of all new mandatory car insurance in the Kazakh market. But the bank is still adding more and more banking services. It is possible to take out an unsecured loan instantly over the app, a car loan, even a mortgage.

“Our super app helps us significantly lower customer acquisition cost,” says Turlov. “I think we are now running the best scoring model in terms of consumer loans, small and medium business loans, insurance policies and life insurance.”

In addition, the Freedom superapp allows you to book a holiday, including plane tickets and a hotel. Did you want to buy tickets for the Jennifer Lopez concert in Almaty in August? That was an option too. Directly in the superapp is also an option to do your grocery shopping. Downloading an e-grocer's own app is not necessary.

Among the most recent additions to the superapp is a movie streaming service, bringing latest Hollywood blockbusters. The advantage of being in Kazakhstan is that there are major streamers who have not set up there, so FRHC has been able to sign distribution rights deals with major studios and create a very similar service to what they offer. The western companies like the deals because they can simply make use of a pre-existing sophisticated platform that the bulk of Kazakh citizens already have on their phones, without the bother of having to build their own local language versions.

Central Asia in general has embraced digital banking. It is emerging as a hotbed for innovation and as a tech hub. Part of the strength of Turlov’s superapp is that it can draw on government digital data (with the customer’s permission). Such a feature largely kills off the need for in-person meetings.

“I'm really sure that our electronic government in Kazakhstan is in the top six in the world,” says Turlov. “It's more advanced than most electronic governments globally – 85% of payments in our country are already cashless – and all of that government integration helps us to be truly digital in our products.” To make the point, Turlov displays his own government digital ID and then downloads the passport of one of his sons.

Turlov also gives the example of taking out a mortgage on a house, a house that the bank has never seen. The bank is lending money to a customer it has never met. The customer is buying it from someone they don’t know. Even reregistering the ownership of the property is included in the digital process. “The whole process can be completed in two hours, starting from scratch, as all the information you need is in the government system,” says Turlov.

Expanding region-wide

The poster boys for Silk Road tech include fintech Kaspi.kz. Also offering a mobile superapp-based ecosystem, it listed in New York in January 2024 with a valuation of $6.5bn. Like Kazakh incumbent Halyk Bank, it is one of Freedom Finance’s main competitors.

Things are also taking off in neighbouring Uzbekistan. Uzum became Uzbekistan’s first unicorn last year, while TBC Uzbekistan, a subsidiary of the Georgia-founded, London-listed TBC Bank Group PLC, is also pioneering fintech marketplace solutions.

FRHC has already set up a brokerage business in Uzbekistan, where it has become one of the largest retail broker-dealers. In Tajikistan, meanwhile, it last year launched the country's first digital bank after receiving a banking licence in the autumn of 2024. The Tajik government invited the company to take a place on the market and create the country’s first fully digital lender. The bank is now expanding with credit cards, mortgages and consumer services through the Freedom superapp model.

“We got a banking licence in Tajikistan in a very short period of time. In less than a year we completed the launch of a completely new bank, the first fully digital bank in Tajikistan, and we are now rolling out our technology, credit card business, client acquiring business, consumer superapp, digital banking and digital mortgages in Tajikistan,” Turlov says. “This move gave us experience of how we can replicate the digital ecosystem we built in Kazakhstan in another country.”

Turlov is now eyeing Georgia, where he's in the process of applying for a banking licence. Those following Freedom would also do well to keep an eye on other markets in the region for launches of its digital banking ecosystem.

In Kyrgyzstan, the group in June opened Freedom Broker in the capital Bishkek, while over in Turkey it secured a brokerage licence and subsequently in January announced the establishment of Freedom Yatirim Menkul Degerler JSC. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is also on the "to do" list. Freedom is close to completing the UAE licensing process for the launch of an institutional business model focused on the B2B segment.

To pay for all this, in December 2023, Freedom issued a $200mn bond-secured loan to finance the development of its telecommunications operator. The company has been purchasing data processing centres and base stations, and also laying fibre optic cables and committing to other capital expenditures as it begins to invest in the infrastructure that will underpin its online business. Connectivity in Almaty is good, but it could be better, and Turlov sees an opportunity to plough investments into telecoms in a way that will accelerate the drive behind Central Asia’s emergence as a tech hub.

FRHC corporate sidebar

Launched in 2008, Freedom Holding Corp (FRHC) had an estimated market capitalisation of $5.8bn as of the time of writing. The workforce amounts to more than 2,900 people across 15 countries.

During the noughties and the following decade, the business continued to grow. In particular, it has become a powerhouse in Kazakhstan, now the main source of the company’s income and its main focus.

By mid-2025, shares in the corporation were trading at around $180, making Turlov the richest man in Kazakhstan, worth a cool $7.6bn.

Freedom’s companies render services to more than 5mn clients, providing them with brokerage, banking and insurance services, as well as flight and event booking, and grocery delivery from an online supermarket.

Freedom Holding under Turlov’s tutelage now spans:

Brokerage (FRHC JSC, FRHC Global, FRHC Europe/Freedom24)

Banking (Freedom Bank Kazakhstan)

Insurance (Freedom Life, Freedom Insurance)

Digital platform (Tradernet for trading)

Payments (Freedom Pay)

Telecom (Freedom Telecom)

Lifestyle services (Arbuz.kz, Aviata)

Kazakhstan-headquartered Freedom Holding reported a 17% y/y rise in revenue to $533.4mn in the first quarter of 2025. The top line was driven by growth in insurance and banking, the company said in an unaudited earnings release on August 8, bne IntelliNews reported.

“Our Q1 results reflect strong momentum across our core verticals and confirm the resilience of our diversified ecosystem,” said Turlov. “We are continuing to invest in technology, expand our offerings, and deepen our presence in key markets, particularly in Central Asia and Europe.”

Banking revenue rose 60% y/y to $146.2mn, with Freedom Bank Kazakhstan’s customer base growing from 2.5mn to 2.9mn.

Insurance revenue increased 18% to $174mn, with net insurance premiums earned reaching $153.3mn and the client base expanding to 1.4mn.

Brokerage revenue was up 1% to $176.3mn, with the number of accounts increasing from 683,000 to 725,000.

Other business units, including lifestyle and telecom operations such as Arbuz.kz, Freedom Ticketon, Aviata and Freedom Telecom, contributed $36.9mn in revenue.

The net gain on trading securities was $45.6mn, compared to a $52.1mn loss a year earlier, largely due to an increase in the market value of Kazakh government bonds in the proprietary portfolio.

The quarter saw the completion of the acquisition of Astel Group to bolster Freedom Telecom’s infrastructure.

Total expenses rose to $492.9mn, including $113.4mn in interest expense, $93.1mn in payroll and bonuses, and $24.5mn in advertising and sponsorships.

Net income attributable to common shareholders was $30.4mn, or $0.50 per diluted share.

Total assets stood at $9.69bn, with shareholders’ equity at $1.23bn.

Cash and cash equivalents were $567.9mn, while the loan portfolio reached $1.75bn, including $231.7mn to related parties.