7 Powers Moat Analysis: Kaspi

1. Scale Economies

Benefit: By building its own closed loop payments network, Kaspi bypassed Visa and Mastercard, and drastically lowered its transaction processing costs. Since Kaspi processes 78% of all payment network transactions in Kazakhstan, it can spread the fixed costs of its technology infrastructure across billions of transactions, resulting in operational leverage and higher margins than competitors.

Barrier: A competitor attempting to build a rival network faces a large volume gap. With Kaspi already serving 15.7 million consumers in a country of roughly 20 million, new entrants cannot reach the transaction volume required to match Kaspi’s low processing costs.

2. Network Economies

Benefit: Kaspi operates a two sided Super App model with the Kaspi app for consumers and the Kaspi Pay app for merchants. As more consumers use the app, more merchants are attracted to the platform. More merchants lead to better product selection and price competitiveness, which attracts even more consumers and drives higher transaction frequency. By the end of 2025, this network effect drove 77 monthly transactions per active consumer.

Barrier: This creates a winner take most dynamic. Consumers have no reason to leave because all the merchants and services are integrated into Kaspi, and merchants cannot leave because they would instantly lose access to 15.7 million buyers.

3. Counter-Positioning

Benefit: When Kaspi launched its Kaspi Pay merchant acquiring network, it used simple QR code technology instead of traditional POS hardware, allowing merchants to adopt it instantly for free. Kaspi charged merchants a flat 0.95% fee which undercut the traditional banking acquiring products that charged 2.5% to 3% fee.

Barrier: Kazakh banks and international payment rails were trapped. To copy Kaspi’s 0.95% QR payment model, legacy banks would have had to cannibalize their highly profitable card revenues and abandon their POS hardware. By the time competitors reacted, Kaspi had already locked in the merchant base.

4. Switching Costs

Benefit: Kaspi is the digital operating system for Kazakhstan. It has deeply embedded itself into the daily life of both consumers and merchants. For consumers, leaving Kaspi means losing access to commission free household bill payments, instant P2P transfers, BNPL, and even their digital government documents, passports, and tax payments. For merchants, Kaspi provides business infrastructure, including Kaspi Shopping Register software, B2B supplier payments, tax filing, and digital advertising.

Barrier: The friction and time of switching away from Kaspi are massive. A user would have to download a bunch of different single use apps to replicate the services in Kaspi’s ecosystem.

5. Brand

Benefit: Kaspi’s focus on delivering a high quality user experience such as underwriting loans in under 6 seconds or offering free nationwide delivery has earned them consumer trust. This allows Kaspi to launch new products like Kaspi Travel or Kaspi e-Grocery and see them quickly adopted with low marketing and customer acquisition costs.

Barrier: According to a 2025 survey, Kaspi has brand dominance. 79% awareness for payments vs. 6% for the next brand, 44% for e-commerce vs. 14% for the next brand, and 59% for deposits vs. 17% for the next brand. Competitors cannot buy this level of psychological preference.

6. Cornered Resource

Benefit: Kaspi’s most powerful resource is its volume of proprietary data. Because Kaspi processes everything from retail purchases and B2B invoices to travel bookings and bill payments, its AI models analyze over 1.6 million user behavior signals per minute, built on a foundation of 24 billion historical transactions.

Barrier: Competitors and traditional banks only see parts of a consumer’s financial life. Because competitors lack Kaspi’s Super App ecosystem, they cannot access the data required to train AI models that match Kaspi’s personalized advertising and credit scoring.

7. Process Power

Benefit: Kaspi has highly complex workflows that give them incredible unit economics. For example, their lending business uses risk algorithms analyzing many data points, allowing them to approve 99.9% of consumer loans in under six seconds while maintaining a low Cost of Risk of 2.0%. The Kaspi Logistics Platform uses machine learning to automatically optimize delivery routes.

Barrier: Even if a competitor understands that Kaspi originates a loan in six seconds or offers incredible delivery, they cannot easily copy the workflows that make it possible without the risk of suffering massive credit defaults or logistical nightmares.