Welcome to our audience in the room and the audience online to the Freedom Holding Investor Day here at the London Stock Exchange. My name is Ayouna Nichayeva. I'm Head of Europe Primary Markets of the London Stock Exchange, and I'm delighted to welcome Timur Turlov, who is the Chairman of the Board, CEO, and founder of Freedom Holding.
I appreciate it. Thank you so much.
Today we are going—we have actually about an hour for the fireside chat. This is an informal interaction. I have a number of questions for you, and then we'll go through those questions, and then hopefully we'll have also some time for questions from the audience after our session. Timur, you spoke so eloquently about Kazakhstan and the opportunity that it represents, especially for the broader technology-enabled industry, and how you sometimes use it as a testing ground or a playground for new technology, which you can then roll out elsewhere, including continental Europe. Maybe for the benefit of our online audience, could you tell us a little bit more about this opportunity, but also maybe a few background facts about Freedom Holding and your key products?
We actually started our business in 2008 in the middle of a financial crisis, building a digital broker to provide access to the retail public, to global markets, to US markets, to let people trade online on New York Stock Exchange and so on. We participated in people's IPO in Kazakhstan and built a network across all our country to let people access some privatization opportunity in 2012, 2014. Finally, after that, our involvement in people's IPO in Kazakhstan, we also became—we did not make money on that program, unfortunately, but I think we were the only broker who invested much their own money for the creation of infrastructure at that time. Finally, we turned to top stock broker by trading volume in Kazakhstan Stock Exchange 2014 and still top one since then.
We participated in the creation of a retail investor base in our country, providing customers access to global markets and also offering them local products time to time. That has helped us to solve this chicken-and-egg problem because usually if you have not enough products on your market, it is not enough investors, and not enough investors mean that nobody needs these products. We initially started to offer European and US products to our people in Kazakhstan, and that created this demand for local high-yield bonds, for local IPOs. Now millions of Kazakhstanians have accounts on the Kazakhstan Stock Exchange, and we still service hundreds of thousands of accounts who time to time trade in local markets.
Definitely, I think Kazakhstan stock markets between Astana International Exchange, Kazakhstan Stock Exchange, International Trading System, and AIFC, now the largest Kazakhstan, I think in Central Asia for sure is a key market, but it's also much bigger than many countries of Eastern Europe, for example. We realized that to be competitive in this world, it's not enough just to be a very good retail online stock broker. We've seen how the digital ecosystem successfully started to compete with stock brokers abroad, in Europe, in Asia, and we realized that if we will not follow that way, if we will not build our own digital ecosystem with banking services, with insurance services, it will be extremely difficult to survive at all. We have to create this ecosystem or to become a part of another ecosystem.
We did not find the chance to become a part of another ecosystem, so we decided to create our own.
That's always the best.
Now, yeah, I think we're happy that we—which is quite not usual. We're the only company from Central Asia with licenses in Western Europe, in the European Union, with investment banking and brokerage licenses in the United States, and we're a direct member of the New York Stock Exchange. We also have a direct membership in some European exchanges and markets. We just recently obtained a license in Tajikistan and are going to launch Bank Life very, very soon, and finishing the final preparations for our IT systems now. Maybe in some months ahead, we will launch our services. We believe that in this world of technology, the final technology, you have to compete globally, otherwise you will lose the local competition.
We tried to roll out our technology, which we created in Kazakhstan, which we created in Cyprus, to provide services on global markets, to get the resources for our further development, and to take our place in this digital bank's global ecosystem and take some of our market share because we're sure that with such talents which we have in Central Asia, in Eastern Europe, we definitely should be very competitive globally. There's completely no reason why we can't compete with people here in Europe or in the United States in terms of talents, in terms of all that stuff.
That's what we certainly see, is the high quality of human talent in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. We are here today at this historic venue at the heart of London's International Financial Centre. Why have you decided to come to London to host this investor day?
We appreciate London's role as a key financial center for the big region, and historically, a lot of companies from Kazakhstan are present on the London Stock Exchange market. We also know that there are a lot of investors here in London who have an expertise to invest in Central Asia, to Eastern Europe, and who cover a very big world outside of continental Europe and the United States. We believe that it's a good place to be and a good chance to present ourselves to very sophisticated investors from the United Kingdom who know about fintech very, very, very well and who can also evaluate our ecosystem and provide some feedback on how we're doing.
That is certainly nice to hear for me, and I would agree that there is a lot of specifically fintech expertise in London across the board. Moving on to the second block of questions, it is around financials. I know that we cannot talk about the quarterly results because they have not yet been announced, but I think last year was pretty successful. I just wanted to ask you about some key takeaways from last year's performance. What would you like to highlight?
I think it's extremely important to mention that, and I think most investors usually appreciate the future much better than the past, and we're sure that it's a great time for investments. We don't like to be a cash cow, and we expect that there's still a lot of potential in front of us. I would be happy if our investors paid much more attention, not just for our current and past performance, in terms of financials, but also to a lot of different non-financial metrics, what's how successful we are in our competition, what happens with our market share. I believe that we live in a very uncertain world, in a world where a lot of different changes happen all the day. I'm very happy that we're happy to know that we, as most of financial companies, are profitable, and we do.
We know that it's much better to invest into the future rather than to be focused on current profits. We still believe that it's a huge room to grow, and it's a huge potential for reinvestment of our income to our future growth. Because in Kazakhstan, in general, financial conditions were very well. We were very good last some years because of very high interest rates. The financial sector was very profitable in general. That's a temporary stuff. You could make a lot of money because of high interest rates. You can lose money sometime, and then this market conjecture can change if the central bank lowers interest rates. Probably that also can suppress this current high-yield income for the longer term.
I do believe that it's a great chance to reinvest our profits because of good general market conjecture for our further growth, for our further development of the ecosystem, and not to be focused on current financial performance as many of our competitors do now. We still believe that our ability to grow our market share and develop our ecosystem, test hypotheses, finally make us maybe not the current leader, and definitely not the leader on profitability in our market, but for the market who could be very promising on the long term because of market position and because of our intention to continue to invest, to grow our market position.
Growth is certainly the name of the game when it comes to the technology sector. Freedom's market cap recently surpassed $10 billion. Congratulations. Five and a half years after going public, how significant is this milestone for you?
I'm very happy. I'm happy to know that we, and I'm very proud that now we are running one of the, I think, definitely top 1,000 companies in the world. That's a huge responsibility, of course, for me in front of investors, in front of my government, in front of our regulators, in front of our customers and shareholders. I'm very proud that we finally became a member of Russell 3000 Investable Index just recently. Once again, I'm much more proud that for us, we see opportunity how to, we spent, I think, more than eight years to create some conditions to create our ecosystem. We started to acquire some companies. We started to build them, grow them, develop their technology. Now we focused on integrations, on integrating everything to our super app.
When we see successful integrations, when we see how our market share is growth of our market share accelerates after this integration, I'm feeling myself much more happy. Actually, for me, this launch of super app is a much more important milestone rather than achieving some market cap because market cap is not what I can directly target. That's, I think, external estimates done by other kinds of investors. I'm very, very happy that our strategy, in which we invested so long and so hard, and definitely not all the market participants shared our vision, not all investors shared our vision in the last period of time. Now for most of them, it's much more clear why we did some of our venture investments, why we acquired these companies, why we invested so much in some different technologies and sectors.
They see how this puzzle is being finalized. When we see that finally the strategy started to pay off, and we see some growth in the different business lines and growth of retention, reduction of customer acquisition costs, that makes me very proud. That makes some impression that maybe finally our vision probably was not wrong, at least.
This takes us neatly to this next topic, which is the products. You have spoken about the super app for quite a lot. The other product that you have is Trader.net, right, the brokerage app or, sorry, technology, yeah?
Yeah, we have this Freedom Broker app, Trader.net.
Yeah. Okay.
That's right. And that's a product which I think we have, we already have a brokerage license in Kazakhstan, and that's the main market. We have a license in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, in Ukraine, in Europe, in the United States. We now work on some final regulatory approvals in some other markets. Brokerage business, we are our core since the formation of the company. And we proved that with the solution which was developed in Kazakhstan, which was developed in Cyprus, we can compete in Europe. And that's a very good testing of quality of our products. We not just can win a competition in Kazakhstan. We can win a competition in Europe and get some, at least we still our market share in Europe is very small, but we see that we are competitive. So we can make money on this.
We can successfully fight for customers with other European firms. We see that our technology is not worse than many other technologies which exist in Europe. We are finally much more cost-efficient in development of this technology. In Kazakhstan, we've already seen how super app can empower growth of this line. We finally believe that maybe in the future, our super app with digital bank, with insurance, should be replicated also in Europe, should be replicated also in other markets. That can accelerate our growth and reduce customer acquisition, increase retention. We believe that in Europe, we've seen many good examples like what Revolut do here, what Robinhood do in the United States. I hope we're following more or less the same directions, maybe with some different approaches, with some different products. Super apps will definitely win standalones.
It is happy to see that Revolut, for example, they offer not just payments. They also offered electronic SIM cards. They offered investment products, crypto products, so a lot of different products. That makes them stronger because each service enriches another one. We believe that the only way to survive for Trader.net is to become a part of a bigger super app, also here in Europe. We understand that is not going to be easy. The market is much more strictly regulated. The market is maybe in some way in continental Europe, it is a bit less tech optimistic. People are much more concerned about some technology issues, privacy issues, which will slow down this development.
We still believe that we have to follow this approach because in some time, I don't know, five years, 10 years, in finance could happen the same which happens almost everywhere on the internet, where Google is Google everywhere else in the world. Maybe in fintech, fintech is very heavily nationally regulated everywhere in the world. It's very difficult now to create some global financial institute. Who knows how the world will change in the next 10 years. We should be ready for this competition. Otherwise, if we will not be able to be competitive on a global level, we will lose the competition in our home market.
Yeah. That's a great point. AI is a big topic, and everyone talks about it. How do you utilize AI, and what types of AI do you use in your services?
I think we're very focused on predictions AI. There were a lot of talks about big data, I don't know, 15 years ago, 10 years ago. A lot of companies started to talk that we need to collect data. We need to process data. Now we see a real opportunity to monetize this data because AI and machine learning approach helped us to process a huge amount of data and still to find some gold inside this huge amount of maybe not the best structured data, which we have already in our data lakes.
Because we collected and structured a lot of data in different business lines, in Kazakhstan, I think we now have one of the most deep data lakes and one of the best structured data lakes where we can do a lot of machine learning in benefit of different services to better understand risk, cost of risk for each banking service, to approve loans instantaneously, and to provide a real risk-based pricing for each individual. We do the same in insurance. That helps us to win a competition because we can precisely try to estimate risk for each driver and not let a good driver pay for a bad driver. That also helped us to fight fraud in banking and insurance with this deep approach for machine learning and to better understand these patterns, also fraud patterns.
That also helped us to turn insurance, car insurance business in Kazakhstan for our company. We finally became profitable in a market where a lot of our competitors do not make money. Especially the last couple of years, car insurance is not the most profitable business in Kazakhstan, at least in mandatory insurance, because the cost of repairs went up and the tariffs went down because of some loss ratio targeting by regulator. That became a huge point for us because of our deep knowledge of our customers. We distinguished a low-risk customer from a high-risk customer in each category. That helped us to provide even much cheaper rates for good customers and win a competition, especially for good customers.
Now we acquire, I think, more than 30% of new customers in B2C business in mandatory car insurance and leading this just because of technology, because of AI. Especially at this moment, we invest hard to better understand customer needs in e-commerce to know better when to offer, what to offer, how to better price, so to better understand what kind of cell phone we may offer to you and at what time. Maybe you want to buy iPhones the launch date. Maybe you want to buy iPhones a year after launch date. Or maybe you prefer to buy Samsung, Samsung of some special category. Analyzing this data, we can make a special offer and carefully use customer retention, not to waste this customer retention.
If you're going to our super app, we can offer you the most actual topic and tell that this is an artist which you can love, and you can book a ticket. That's a cell phone at the right time because you usually change your cell phone every two years, for example, or every three years. That's a model which you may like. That's a special condition for you. This predictions risk management is huge in our day-to-day business because I think for most of financial houses, we do two stuff. We do risk management, and we do transactions. Transactions is very highly competitive. It's very hard to make money on transactions this time. The most money is being made on understanding of risk. We became one of the best in consumer lending because of deep understanding based on machine learning.
We're also becoming the biggest thing in insurance because of our deep understanding of machine learning. We also try to win competition in e-commerce because of our understanding of consumer needs and recommendation system. We don't invest hard to generative AI at this moment. We also try to make our services much more efficient. For example, our news feed could be translated and retold, rewritten by AI to make news native and in many different languages simultaneously with the publication, which also helped us finally to unlock research on many different national languages, to unlock news feeds for many different national languages to our customers, even if that's to make accessible information in Kazakh language, for example, for people in Kazakhstan at a very, very simultaneously like it happens in English. Still with a high quality using these AI models.
That's fantastic. The predictive AI is just so scary, right? Because this technology sometimes offers you things that you didn't know you wanted. And then you see it like, oh, I actually do want this. It's very accurate, actually. There is one more thing I wanted to ask you about, integrated digital ecosystem. You did mention that you wanted to integrate Trader.net into the super app. In terms of your approach, what sets you apart from competition? What is the USP of Freedom Holding?
We do believe that we need to better understand consumer needs. We also should make a process of investments interesting and easy. I'm not sure that we need to integrate all the services to SuperApp, but at least some of them should be present. It should be very easy to switch between different applications. It should be very easy to open an account. It should be easy to track your account. If you want to trade, you just need to push one button and maybe go to a special professional app, which will allow you to use better scope of technology, which will allow you to use very different functionality. We usually see that in many different ecosystems. They have a standalone brokerage app and still a lot of integration to their banking solution.
In a banking solution, you can maybe buy most simple products. Then if you want to trade on the markets, you switch to some different application, which is deeply integrated, which still allows you to top up your account, to transfer money and security simultaneously, very fast, very easy, very cheap. Efficiency in processing of any orders on any transactions. In this digital world, you have to be fast. You have to be cheap. You have to provide an interesting content to your customers, an interesting product to customers. Usually, you do not need to be extremely unique. You have to do everything a bit faster, a bit more useful, more stable, a bit cheaper than others. That is enough to win a competition globally, usually.
I'm sure that in the end of the day, this super app integrations just help us to provide better and cheaper services because of much better efficiency in customer acquisitions of a lot of different cross-monetizations also helps to allow you to keep a much lower margin on each product because you can benefit from a full basket of them.
Thinking about the regions where you operate, you mentioned Kazakhstan. If we look at the broader Central Asian opportunity and the Caucasus market, could you talk a little bit more about the opportunity in this broader part of the world?
Yeah. Kazakhstan is quite unique because I think we are the only investment-grade country in a region of Central Asia and most of Eastern Europe. We are the only country with free capital accounts even in a much bigger region. A very good and stable government position, opportunities of Astana International Financial Centre and common law regulation, independent court of Astana International Financial Centre, and a very attractive tax regime, which also provides zero taxes for most of financial products, which also makes life easier for a lot of investors locally and globally. I do believe that we are the only pretendant to a new financial center of this region. We need to rebuild connectivity between the Central Asian countries.
Kazakhstan became a new financial hub for the region to connect different banks directly one with another to let people from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Caucasus, Georgia transfer money very fast in national currencies because we still live in a lot of labor migration. People still may share the same culture, talk the same language. That is a very big economical space. This space is not yet well connected. We should rebuild our financial center and use this chance. That is why we believe that our technology, which is actually proved as competitive in Kazakhstan, we should go to other Central Asian and Caucasus markets to try to leverage it there. Based on our banking network, we maybe can create the right links between banks to create less borders and to make payments faster, cheaper, and more efficient.
Finally, to become a trade and investment hub for all this big region because it's still an empty space. After the war happened in Russia, a lot of Central Asian markets just became disconnected. Also, still, not all of them have a good connectivity with European and U.S. markets, U.S. banks. Even facilitation of payments across Central Asia now is not the easy stuff. Sometimes it takes a lot of time. It's expensive. The amount of transactions sometimes is very, very low. We believe that it's a good space to grow and leverage technology because the technology itself is very competitive.
If we also can gain a synergy of these cross-border payments for private people, for small amounts of money, that also can help and create a very huge opportunity for Kazakhstan to make a new financial network for the region, which will be, in my opinion, very demanded by small businesses, by individuals.
Yeah. Sounds like a massive opportunity. People will go work in a neighboring country. They want to send money back to their family.
Yeah.
Yeah, small businesses want to do business in different countries in the region.
Their expense is very huge now. It is being processed very, very slow. It is still expensive and still relies sometimes on some foreign payment systems, which is not efficient. They still rely on many stuff from Russia, which is also not very easy for many. We should take this opportunity. We should also offer some competitive product for the region.
Sounds fantastic. I know you have invested in digital infrastructure products in Kazakhstan. Recently, you've invested in a large data center in Almaty. What difference does this make? How can Kazakhstan distinguish itself as the key chain in the network of global connectivity, just building on your previous?
In my opinion, Kazakhstan is not just the only open capital accounts country. We also have, I think, a quite liberal regulation of internet. We definitely could be a great partner for many global hyperscalers, for Amazon, Google, Meta, for many Western and Eastern companies who need a presence in the middle of a big continent. Because for many of them, if we will see on a map, I'm not sure that Amazon has anything between Eastern Europe and Korea. It is a very, very huge space. It is thousands of kilometers without any hyperscaler services and any public clouds. Actually, Freedom is one of the largest consumers of these clouds in the region already. If we are demanding to be one of the largest digital ecosystems, we are demanding to be the largest consumer of cloud services in the region.
We also believe that it's still a strong demand from many other companies who can provide cloud services to all Eurasian, for all the middle of Eurasia, to big amounts of Central Asian countries. Kazakhstan, with our liberal regulation of data, I think it could be a good space for a country with a very good relationship with East and West, with a good governance, with stable, I think, regulations, with cheap energy. In the end of the day, still cheap. It's a good space and a very attractive place to actually develop this data center infrastructure, cloud infrastructure. That's why we believe that we have to invest here also. That's going to leverage countries that can leverage our needs. If we will not build these data centers, we could meet problems for our own business development.
We see that even Freedom can't predict our data processing needs. Sometimes we expect to need some, sometimes we also, as many other competitors do, make a wrong estimation of our needs. Sometimes our data needs are growing much, much faster than our expectations. If we invest in this public cloud infrastructure, that will mean that even Freedom can benefit and take more computing power if we need. If we do not need, we will be happy to share with the rest of the markets. Freedom itself could be a big consumer of that. We need a reliable digital infrastructure. We need a reliable data infrastructure in our country to support our growth and our stability in the market. We are not sure that we can rely on anyone else here.
That certainly plays a massive role in risk management overall and obviously ensuring data safety and data security.
Yeah. Because we can't, unfortunately, we can't use, I don't know, Amazon Web Services located outside of Kazakhstan because of national data regulation. We should keep it in our country. If we will not build these data centers, we can be in a position when we will have a demand and have no supply at all. This supply will not appear instantly. Even if you're ready to spend $1 billion, you will still need some years to build. I believe that it's a good business, actually, to invest here because probably most of our competitors, most of our players in the market, our government, all of us underestimate demand. Probably we will need much more than we expect. It could be very smart to build now some computing powers, some data centers. Our president also tells the same.
I am fully sharing his approach to these data centers. We will try to use this. Our government is favorable. They try to support these projects. We will use this opportunity to build infrastructure.
Certainly, it will be great to see that happen. Then it is great to see that you are ahead of the curve and anticipating massive growth and demand and managing the risk at the same time.
Yeah. It is funny because we do not have much infrastructure in Central Asia at this moment at all. If you compare to, I do not know, to the U.K., even per capita, we still have such a massive opportunity to grow. It is just because at this moment, we have a very, very, very small data center supply. Our market is very tiny. It could be much, much bigger based just on our GDP per capita.
We have about eight minutes left. Please start thinking about questions if you would like to ask any. We have two questions left. I have two questions left for you. One is around market stability. We have seen the first half of the year, as us at the London Stock Exchange, well, we at the London Stock Exchange, we are really, how do we, a big part and parcel of the process where we are trying to handle market volatility, et cetera, et cetera. From your perspective, how have you approached and handled, actually, market volatility and instability from a business perspective?
I think in general, at least for retail ecosystems, for retail brokerage ecosystems, market volatility means a higher turnover and finally higher revenue, higher commission revenue. I never seen much market stability last time. Everything happens, almost something strange happens almost every year. We are now more resilient to these unexpected events than ever before. We see more technology challenges rather than some special financial challenges because of that. The high volatility usually creates a huge demand. Customers started, customers may want to trade simultaneously, do transactions simultaneously. That creates a huge demand for IT infrastructure. IT infrastructure should be resilient enough to afford your customers, to afford our customers to trade. If you have online, I do not know, thousands of customers, and at some moments of volatility, some hundreds of thousands can come.
That's requiring a much different approach to full infrastructure building, to all architecture, to plan your architecture of IT systems, which should be scalable, which should also rely on some clouds to afford this overusage in some short period of time. Then again, a much slower consumption in a much slower market. At the end of the day, I always love to talk that which doesn't kill us makes us stronger. Every next crisis also creates huge opportunities and sometimes accelerates trends. If we will just look back to many crises which we've gone through in the last 15 years, all of them finally turned into huge opportunities for our company.
OK. My last question. It's actually going to be a summary of all the questions. What is your ultimate vision for Freedom? Where do you want to take it both conceptually and geographically? What role would you like it to play in people's lives? It's going to probably include all of what you've said before. Maybe if you can sort of summarize it, that would be great.
I believe that we still can grow in Kazakhstan and still have a huge potential, which could be realized quite fast. Kazakhstan for us is still a laboratory for testing a lot of hypotheses, which we can scale outside of our country, maybe even outside of Central Asia. We still see a huge potential in Europe and in the United States. We already have experience dealing with these markets. We already have licenses to support our growth. We still keep a quite opportunistic approach because I think at the end of the day, everyone will face global competition. We need to be quite opportunistic in terms of if we will find a way to approach any market with our digital technology, with our digital banking, with our digital brokerage, if the regulation will allow us to roll out our technology.
We need to build our technology as scalable as possible to be able to roll out this technology on many different markets and to create a team who will be able to do that. Because at the end of the day, I'm sure that the competition in finance will become quite similar to what happens in global search on the internet and to social media when most of the people globally can use the service of one company or something like that. The market will have a very unfair distribution. I believe that the digital ecosystems finally win a competition with standalones. We also believe that we have a lot of experience building this and developing this ecosystem. Maybe we should demand to be one of this global competitor in terms of building a digital ecosystem in the next couple of decades.
I believe that we can prove that our approach is competitive. Finally, we can become a part of one of the leading ecosystems at the end of the day or to create one.
Yes. We are certainly all looking forward to seeing this happen. With this, I'd like to invite everyone to say thank you to Timur.
Thank you. Thank you very much, and welcome back to the heart of the city of London, still one of the world's great financial centers. We're here at the London Stock Exchange for this conference. My name's Chris Bishop. I'm a journalist. I've been working for something like 44 years now, and I spent 30 of those years working in Africa, but I was very much a business journalist, which is why I'm very happy to be here today having this discussion. Now, I'm just introducing my panel here. Starting on my left, Mr. Timur Turlov, the founder and CEO of Freedom Holding Corp. Then we have Dr... Oh, no, we don't. We have Philippe Voglier, director, Freedom Holding Corp. He's based here in London. Then we have Dr.
Kairat Kelimbetov, the Director of Freedom Holding Corp., but also the founder of the Astana International Financial Centre, which we will be talking a little bit about early in this discussion. Last but not least, Mr. Andrew Gamble, the Director of Freedom Holding Corp. Thank you very much for joining me here. In terms of just giving us an idea of the roots of this company, because obviously I am going to talk about your listing first on the Nasdaq, what were the humble beginnings of this operation? Oh, I think we started in the middle of the financial crisis when the bank where I worked decided to close out investment subsidiary because of the financial crisis.
We actually launched a very small boutique firm to provide access to retail people to global markets, to provide internet trading, online trading for, to access US markets for people in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. That is, that's how it started. It started out of six people, very small infrastructure, very small office.
How small? Tell me.
I don't know. I think our first office was like 20 sq m or something like that. Like that.
Okay. You have risen and you listed on the Nasdaq, which has been the pinnacle of your achievement. Actually, from 20 sq m, that's actually quite an achievement. What's next? How are you going to top this? Where are you looking to?
That was a big dream for us to finally be listed and to be good enough to be listed, which is even more important, to satisfy all the disclosures requirements, transparency requirements, audit requirements, controls, so corporate governance requirements. It is like how to get into the high league of doing business. I believe that with the same approach, I want now to compete for, to be able to win competition in my home country in terms of consumer ecosystem. I think we have some chance now. We are definitely not yet done that, but have some chance and some potential to win. I also believe that we can and we should grow not just in Central Asia. We already, I think, are quite the only firm who has a license in Europe and in the United States.
We have an investment banking license and brokerage license, not just in Central Asian countries. We also have a license in, we have a New York Stock Exchange membership. We have access to European markets. We are competitive with our retail platform, with our mobile app, with our online brokerage solution here in Europe. We service almost 500,000 people in the European Union through our Freedom Finance Europe, based in Cyprus this time. I believe that this digital ecosystem, which we built now in Kazakhstan, they could be replicated globally. We can roll that out not just in Kazakhstan, not just in Central Asian countries, but also to compete with companies like Revolut here in Europe and the United Kingdom to compete in the United States with the same digital ecosystem.
That's my dream, actually, to finally build a global banking network, based on, quite a similar, digital solution.
Just say a little bit more about the business, Philippe. I come to you. I mean, you're here in London, in the heart of the financial community. And your job is to look into partnership creation, look into what's going on in the business. How are you seeing the company faring in these very difficult times? I mean, let's all be honest, they are probably the most difficult times most of us have seen in our lives.
I suppose first I have to say I'm an exec on the company, so my job is to supervise the activities that are happening. To answer specifically to your point, I don't see these times as being difficult times. I see them as being a fantastic school of opportunity, really.
There are different changes happening, but changes are happening pretty much every three years in IT, every six years in telecoms. It is a fast-moving industry. We are used to that type of thing. I would see three automatic opportunities, really, Chris. One is Central Asia as such. You have different initiatives that have been done. I do not believe that in any large ecosystem of, you know, in this case, 100 million people, you can say, okay, we will do everything the same exact way, but you can get to get them more or less the same way. You can decide to place different activities in different places. There is a huge opportunity right there, starting with the fact that if you look at today, the population of these regions pretty much half do not have access to those services. That as a potential is gigantic.
You go to a wider international and you see a replication really of same same, which is first part is, you know, we spoke Africa earlier on, a large chunk of the population does not have access to services of this nature, but the same happens in Europe and the same happens in the U.S. There is a very large potential there. Now, of course, you can start asking, is this really replicatable exactly the same way? No. Again, the regulations will be different. The government aspirations of those services will be a different way. What is common is that the people around the world want exactly the same type of services. They want something easy. They do not want to queue. They want it to be available on their phone, possibly, or computer or whatever. That is not likely to change.
With that, you have a high demand. That high demand will probably translate into a high political push where people will say, I want this and my neighbor is getting it. You make it happen, which again creates a huge opportunity for companies like us to say, hey, by the way, we have a solution here. We can bring it to you. We can expand. We can help you change the regulations. We can help you adapt. There is a third and fantastic opportunity to my eyes, which is in a moment where, you know, the norms or the way that the global order is currently being revisited, obviously it creates opportunities for different countries to say, hey, by the way, I have a different solution than the one that has been used for the last 25 years.
And then you let governments and people choose whether they like what they see, they want to try it. Yeah, I really think there is a huge opportunity for a fintech like us.
Can you talk a little bit more about Kazakhstan? I want to come to you, Dr. Kelimbetov. I mean, you were the founder of the Astana International Financial Centre at the time. I'm not quite sure how it was received at the time, but I mean, how much muscle is there and how much financial infrastructure is there in your country?
Yeah, I think like shortly maybe about background. I think Kazakhstan enjoyed mostly investment. It's a leading economy in Central Asia. It's like we are more than 60% of GDP of this region. Definitely was a very well-developed financial center.
I think London Stock Exchange Group was a historical place to bring first Kazakh governmental companies here to be listed here. I remember the first dual listing between Astana International Exchange, which is part of Astana International Financial Centre, and London Stock Exchange was the IPO for Kazatomprom, which is a national uranium company. Kazakhstan is one of the number one producers of raw materials uranium. Historically it was very good ties. I think London was a place where kind of Kazakhstan learned a lot from in terms of the corporate governance development, especially after the global financial crisis in 2008.
It was a very important understanding that corporate governance is not just paperwork, but it should be real kind of governance and it should be really independent directors in the board, which is responsible in terms of all the investors. This is something we work which was done previously. I think in 2015 it was the idea to create also like kind of the subsystem, which is Astana International Financial Centre. The idea was to create common law jurisdiction based on principles of common law jurisdiction in Kazakhstan, like very similar, which is like Hong Kong is in China, one country, two systems. Very similar to in Kazakhstan, we traditionally have a European continental law on the mainland of Kazakhstan. Then we decided to create in Astana the International Financial Centre, very similar like was done in Dubai and Abu Dhabi recently.
It was like separate independent regulators there based on best examples of Bank of England, FSA, monetary authorities of Singapore, like business friendly, tech friendly regulators. This is one part of the story. The other one is International Independent Court, which consists of the British retired judges and International Arbitration Center, which has been led by the team of the legendary Lord Wolf. I think that we are very proud that now we do have this very proactive independent court. We have already more than 1,000 cases there. We have already more than 3,000 companies registered in this financial center. A huge gravity is now kind of after the takeoff, it's like exponential growth of the companies, which has enjoyed this development.
I think Freedom is also one of the companies which is using the advantages of this kind of common law jurisdiction and mainland jurisdiction from both sides. I think that in AIFC we mostly focus on capital markets development and fintech. In the mainland of Kazakhstan it is more like a banking-laden institution culture with a 95% mostly banks, but we are also using these advantages of the digital banks, which is to more explain briefly, I think. I want just to say one good word about the work which was done by Freedom last 10 years. I think as a banking-lending institution-centric financial system, we kind of have been more focused on the products, which was mostly like deposits from the population, but then lending like consumer lending, stuff like this.
I think that the role of the capital markets was not so good and even like it was not like a culture to invest to global equities. It changed when, like, it was from one side demographical trends that millennials are coming and it is a huge growth of the population in Kazakhstan, a huge role of the youth, which are people who are more like based on online understanding of the services from financial institutions. From the other side is like transformation of the capital markets, increasing the role of capital markets. I think Freedom plays a revolutionary role on this, completely changed it. Now I think it is very popular and people really believe in the future of capital markets. It is like a synergy between global markets and local domestic markets.
One issue I want to discuss here as well is the issue of regulation. We were all talking about it before. Mr. Gamble, I know it's your job to look after this. I've written a lot about foreign investors down the years. One thing they say to me always, they say regulation, fine, but can we have consistency? Can we have regulation that lasts for 10, 20 years so we can plan ahead for the future and invest? Their complaint is that things keep changing all the time. How are you finding it?
I mean, I think regulation in a lot of these markets is actually very similar. Throughout the finance industry globally, you'll find similar themes, I think, in every jurisdiction, which from the point of view of Freedom is an advantage because we have so many different businesses in different jurisdictions.
It makes it a lot easier to perceive what the problems and issues are because you are confronted with the same kind of thing, be it in Kazakhstan or be it in Cyprus. A lot of the same themes keep coming up. I think that in relation to change, I mean, that's in terms of regulations changing, I think that's the same challenge that we're confronted with in all of these markets. I think that at the moment there's a reasonable amount of stability. On the basis of that, we've managed to establish over the past 24 months a very solid structure within Freedom in terms of both dealing with the risk function and compliance. We've brought in some really good people. I know that there was a comment earlier about the human capital in Central Asia.
I must say I've been on the board for 12 months as Chair of the Risk Committee, and I have been really impressed by the quality of the people that Freedom employs. I was the Chair of a Risk Committee for a U.K. regulated bank. I sat on the Risk Committee of a multilateral. I can say that in terms of the quality of people I'm dealing with in relation to the CRO, the Chief Compliance Officer, and the CTO, the level is really high. It's international standards. We have put in place over the past 18 months or so a system whereby not only do we have high quality control over risk and compliance at the holding level, but also cascading down into the subsidiaries.
Each of the companies in the group have their own teams, and those teams coordinate with and communicate with the group structure. That is working really well. It would not be so much change in regulation that I see as a challenge. I think that there are a number of risks that any financial group like Freedom is confronted with. That includes cybersecurity. I mean, we were talking over coffee, actually. I mean, the whole cyberspace is a challenge, not least in terms of hackers trying to get into your system. If you take the example of CrowdStrike, which I have to say was something that did not affect Freedom, we handled that. That is when you have got someone who is meant to be protecting you and putting patches in to protect you, and the whole thing comes down.
We do spend a lot of time, particularly given the nature of the business that Freedom's got, focusing on technology and making sure that we are as secure as we can be. Indeed, the CTO is one of the three key people who's part of the risk team. As I say, based on my own experience in terms of being a chair of a risk committee for a U.K. bank and sitting on the risk committee of a multilateral, I think Freedom is doing a great job and I'm very positive.
I'll come back to you, Mr. Turlov. I mean, you're investing millions in infrastructure and in building up the technology. How much of that is going to be taken up by cybersecurity? I mean, it's a huge worry. I mean, when companies like Marks and Spencer's get cyber attacked, you've got to stop worrying about it.
What are you going to do about it? Yes, I think in 2020 we adopted a new strategy for cybersecurity risk management. I think since 2020 we started to spend millions of US dollars especially for cybersecurity. Every next year we have to invest more and more. Unfortunately, maybe much more than I want to invest to this. Cybersecurity is a big thing. It is not just how to be resilient in terms of different kinds of challenges. Not just to protect ourselves from hackers, but also cybersecurity became an extremely big part of all management process. We have to be resilient to huge demands.
We have to be huge resilience to many social engineering stuff because I think the key problem in I think most of successful attacks to different organizations is based on some social engineering and some attempts to get through people. That is why this social security is becoming in focus on many of our regulators because that is, I think, all different financial authorities or different telecom regulators in our country. All of them are demanding from us to keep these controls in place, to disclose incidents if they happen. All of that makes we depend on confidence of our customers, confidence that their personal data will be safe, that their banking secrecy will be safe, that in the end of the day they could rely on our services and services themselves will be reliable because of their architecture, because of their resilience to external and internal threats.
I think now unfortunately we spend some tens of millions for this cybersecurity, but we have no other choices. It's just impossible to deal and keep if you want to be the leading consumer ecosystem, so you have to be a leading company in terms of our expenditures to cybersecurity. Otherwise, all your investments, all your hundreds of millions which you invest into IT could be wiped out if you will finally lose your mission critical businesses and operations for a long period of time. I believe sooner or later we will become a top bank for payments in our country. If for some reason we will fail for a long period of time, that creates a lot of risk for the country. We have to be protected and we have to be and it's definitely difficult to underinvest here.
Briefly, Philippe, what's your view on this? We were talking earlier. You had seemed to have strong views on it, but what do you think?
First, I have to agree with Timur on the fact that it's a no-brainer. You have to be super good at it. Negative people around the world will try to take advantage of your clients, of yourselves, etc. You have no choice but to invest into this. Now, I really find the security debate to be a tale of two cities, really, Chris, which is on the one hand, all of the people in this room and probably all the people who are watching online are putting their lives on social media all year long, and therefore they are basically sharing quite a lot of sensitive data which could be used against themselves. I don't really see an end to that.
At the same time, when you look at the B2B or the SME world, clients sign SLAs by which they guarantee that they will safeguard the security. Then you have this third layer, which is the current debate you have in the U.S. about who can access the data and for what purpose. You see all these currently brewing together where I see I've been in telecoms for the last nearly 30 years, and you see a lot of corporate clients saying, "Okay, where should I host my data in such a way that my clients are actually safe, not only from hackers, but also from state intervention, if I can call it that way, because it is their data. They do not want to share it even if it's well-intended." Interestingly enough, this, Chris, brings me back to 15 years ago.
I was living in the Gulf, and the Gulf was most of the countries in the Gulf were saying, "You know, this natural trend where everybody believes they can store all their data in the cloud or in the US, etc., it has to come to an end at some stage because you can't be sure that you will be able to trust that." You see this debate coming back now where people say, "Maybe I need to edge my bets a bit more." I think, again, if I see this as a huge opportunity again for countries like Kazakhstan, for Central Asia, but also other non-aligned type of groups where you can say, "If I can create an infrastructure where I can guarantee the security of this data, and on top of that, I can evidence to the world that we have companies like Freedom who are very good at extracting value from that data without endangering the clients, then you create not just a competitive advantage for the company, but you create a competitive advantage for the region, and that can then be re-exported to others where you can say, 'You know what?
Instead of having your data center in country X, why do not you put it in my region because I will guarantee its safety much better.'
This is a core to your business, this issue. If I could just ask you two gentlemen just a brief comment on it as before we move on.
Yeah, I think the cybersecurity is one of the top three global risks, and everybody understands what is going on. It is now become more and more popular among the, let us say, hackers maybe to destroy these national funded systems. I believe that Freedom is doing a great job. We know all these people who are doing by all hands and all minds every day this job, and we are good on this, and we will continue to do it.
I think that it also would be great if the big financial institution would share best practice among each other. It has to be done. Yeah. I mean, it's very much a focus of what Freedom's doing that it has or builds up as much reliance as it can internally in terms of building its own data centers, controlling those data centers. They'd rather, as it were, build and control and use excess capacity to sell to third parties rather than actually participate in a third-party data center. In terms of the issue of protecting individual data, I mean, a lot of and going back to your point about regulation and my point about the fact that a lot of these regulations are similar.
The Brussels effect with the GDPR has meant that in many of the jurisdictions in which we operate, people basically or the regulators basically follow something which is akin to GDPR, which in a sense makes our life easier, even though it's a difficult set of regulations to follow. We have in place and are continuing to expand a system whereby we ensure that we're compliant in terms of getting appropriate consents. We're putting DPOs in all of the significant companies so that we are meeting the regulatory requirements. When we come to use the data, we take the appropriate steps to depersonalize it because that's a key thing in terms of getting a lot of value out of the data going forward to make sure that we properly depersonalize it, and then it can be fed into our data lake and used for other businesses.
That's something that our CTO and the rest of the team are very much focused on. Again, another area where I think we're very strong and I'm very positive.
Coming back to the issue of investment here, and it's something I know you're all very passionate about, I'm going to start with you, Dr. Klemenetov. I mean, how do you feel? Kazakhstan, it's in the middle in the vortex of an emerging market. There's a lot of rewards. There's a lot of risks, yes. It seems to me, like many of the investors that I've spoken to in Africa, there's always this risk premium that's put on the top of everything. Even if you've got the best roads, the best rails, the best infrastructure, strong broadband, they'll say, "No, no, no, 20-25% at least." That's your risk premium. What do you think about this sort of stuff in the 21st century?
Yeah, I think in this terms, in our region of which we're called like Central Asia plus like South Caucasus, including like a few countries from there. Kazakhstan, again, is a leading economy. I think it's less risky. The idea of creating Astana International Financial Centre for investors was like de-risking, let's say, because we have a very similar principle of regulation in the mainland and similar principle on Astana International Financial Centre. We are following all these European standards. For banking sector, like Basel III for securities market, we are a member of IOSCA. We are very much close, I mean, to all of this understanding of the regulation from one side. From the other side, yes, I believe that our region has great opportunities.
Now it's growing demographically, so it will be very soon more than 100 million people. It's like a strategic role, like connect West and East and North and South. Kazakhstan in this terms is a country connector. We believe that we can provide a lot of opportunities for investors. You probably know that we have a vast geography as Kazakhstan, and we are very rich as very similar maybe early stage of Canada and Australia. We have not only oil and gas, but we have like all mining, uranium, rare earth, and now it's become critical for the entire world from one side. From the other side, we leapfrogging many digital dimensions, which allow us to create a lot of tech-friendly companies.
That's why I think that we enjoy the first listing of the Kazakh companies here, like Kaspi in London Stock Exchange, later on on Nasdaq and Freedom and Nasdaq. It's like a new Kazakh story which we are trying to bring, and it's a lot of the opportunities. Again, what I would like to mention, Freedom and using Kazakhstan as a lab, as Timur said, as like R&D to test what we can do, having access to the, I like the name like Data Ocean, which is like a data lake, let's say, big data, because it's already too big, this ocean. From one side, but from the other side, the model of Freedom easily can be scaled. I mean, like anyway, regulation is different in all countries. The same principle probably, but we should be adapt. Freedom is very easy, can adapt many stuff like this.
Mr. Turlov, I mean, how do you approach this as someone who's trying to secure investment in emerging markets when people are saying, talking about this extra risk they're facing by investing in an emerging market? How do you approach that?
I think this balance between risk and opportunities is still kind of arbitrage. People usually overestimate risks and underestimate opportunities. That's just human nature. I believe that that's for especially that kind of investors who can be more, who can be more agnostic here and who can be not, who will take a look into some special opportunities. In this global digital world, it's much easier to, I think it's much easier for talents to find the right monetization. And when the right people do the right technology, it's much easier now to audit that.
The business is becoming more similar to what usually people see in their businesses. For anyway, digital business is based on talents. They're not based on land. They're not based on permissions. They're usually based on talents at the end of the day. I hope that in my country, it's a lot of very well-educated people. It's a very tech-optimistic government at this moment. I see that many members of our government, our presidents, they really want to see Kazakhstan as a country of this tech development, a country of fintech, a country of tech, a country of AI. They are very supportive to all entrepreneurs and all companies who make this, who make some efforts to promote that.
I believe that's also a great investment opportunity because I think everybody in our government understands very, very well that any success of digital ecosystem is based on talents. Nobody will, if you will for some reason, destruct the motivation of key people, that will destruct the company. I think that's also this understanding is a good protection for most investors globally, not just in our country. I think definitely the Government of Kazakhstan already understands that very, very well. That will happen everywhere in the world. Maybe you have some risk to lose, I don't know, some access to natural resources. It's very difficult actually to take advantage of a company based on talents.
It's very difficult to, I don't know, to do some, to rate a company based on talents in any way, even in some countries from Africa, from some other regions with less culture of protecting private property. I think now it's much less risky to do business because business is much based on talents, and talents is definitely not just about rules and regulation and so on. For anyway, Kazakhstan is quite unique. It's still not such a highly competitive market like the U.K., but it's full of talents, full of young people. It's much cheaper at the end of the day. Also, technology development is much cheaper. The country in general is more optimistic. On the other hand, we still have a very good legislation system, and actually the actual risks are not such high as you may expect.
Philippe, I mean, you with investors all the time here in London, give us an insight. What is their view of Kazakhstan when you're out there talking with people?
I would be astonishing to the audience by pretending I know everything about the diversity of views. I think in the main, two things. One is it's fairly unknown still today. There has to be something to market it. It's, again, pushing successes like this one are phenomenal. I was discussing with people from the embassy today, and I said, "You know, your fantastic embassy in London, right in the center of the city." That is pretty impressive. People pass there, and you go, "Canada? Kazakhstan? Wow." You can start talking about, but joke aside, there is something about a changing conversation. I will confess, I've been in technology for 30 years.
I did not know much about Kazakhstan and Central Asia, except that it was right there in the middle. Today, you see a lot of new technologies coming from that region. You see a lot of, I was in China two months ago, in Japan, etc. People talk about the potential of that region to be this bridge. It's about us to activate that. Just for instance, we have very casually passed the mark of $10 billion as a company this month. Again, should we try to make a bit more noise about that? Because again, it's not nothing. It's a very big thing. Fifteen years ago, ten years ago, there were, what, ten employees in the room, as Timur is saying. Nowadays, it's 10,000 employees in dozens of offices around the world. It's a phenomenal growth story. I think we need to push that.
At the same time, I think we need to take, again, this investor type of story. Most industries, when entities go beyond $10 billion, they have to change because they move from this startup to, I would still like to be a startup and pack up 48 hours in 24 per day. I know that I need to change. I think we are in that point. As we can see here, we are a different board. We are a new board. The management is evolving as well, etc., etc. There is a lot of new practice coming. From there, you can keep expanding, which then tells the story to the market that the market wants to hear. I think the last point, maybe if you allow me, is to say we have to remain incredibly readable.
Today, people know exactly what it is that we are trying to do. As we expand into more countries, more streams of work, etc., there is always a risk that we would blur what it is that we stand for. I mean, the telecom industry, when there you were there just for mobile connectivity, then it was data, then it went into financial services, then it was back to connectivity, then it was to hosting, etc., etc. You end up with the risk of blurring what you stand for. We need to stay very, very clear and readable towards what it is that we do so that people can say, "Huh, I want to expand into this. Maybe I can talk to these guys to do a JV or to do an M&A with them," etc.
I think if we can get these elements, which is keep pushing the image of the story of the countries, keep pushing the integration, the fact that we are doing something at regional level which is different than what has been done in other places, making these bridges between the different regions and say, "You know what? We're not part of your debates between large countries. We're right in the middle, and we can help you, all of you." That's pretty strong. At company level, be really, really clear onto what we are so that people can say, "Oh yeah, yeah, I want that."
Unfortunately, we're nearing the end of this discussion. The two letters we can't leave without talking about, A and I. What is the company's approach to AI? You got it.
I think we are one of the key beneficiaries of predictive AI and of machine learning in general because working with the digital ecosystem, we collect a lot of data and we already structured a lot of data. Now we do a lot of research, which when every subsidiary after this depersonalization, we may enrich our decision-making models to better understand risk of some events, to better manage some fraud risk, to better manage credit risk, to better manage insurance risk and some incidents risk, life insurance risk, to better predict customer needs, to better understand for which products we need to design and which products will be better demanded by our customers. That creates, I think, at the end of the day, the key financial business is about two stuff.
We need to make transactions, and we need to be able to estimate risk correctly. What credit institutions do is they actually trade risk. They are buying consumer money and they're lending money. They just have a better knowledge. They should have a better knowledge how to better distribute this money, how to better evaluate the risk much better than their customers can do by themselves. I'm sure that with the deep use of AI, we can do this much, much more efficiently in terms of insurance, in terms of lending, in terms of many different kinds of transactions. At the end of the day, that makes the financial sector much smaller, much more efficient, and consume much less GDP than it is.
At the end of the day, I'm sure that as well as it happens with global search and internet, like Google dominates search, I think the same will happen to finance. It also will be a very unfairly distributed market with some companies who will lead consumer ecosystems. They will be, and then probably we will see some banks with a market share like 70-80%, some top second like 10%, and all the rest will be a very, very, very small market share at the end of the day.
I have to ask Mr. Gamble here. I mean, AI, does it bring a whole new raft of legal questions or not?
It does bring a whole new raft of legal questions and associated risks. These are all things which, as a company, we are very capable of coping with because we're so deeply embedded in the whole IT space. I do want to pick up on a couple of points. I mean, the first is that I have been involved in Kazakhstan for nearly 30 years. I am the chair of the largest law firm in Kazakhstan. I see several deals going across our desks in the region every day involving a whole range of companies: Chinese companies, Western European companies, U.S. companies. Kazakhstan is not Africa. I can say that by also assuring you that I'm the chair of a company which invests in Africa. It is a completely different economy and different setup. That is the first point I wanted to make.
The second point is that Philippe and I would not have come on this board as we did 12 months ago unless we were happy with the governance. I am conscious of the fact there is some history in the London Stock Exchange with previous companies with involvement in Kazakhstan where I guess it has not been an entirely happy relationship. I believe that we are at a level of maturity and freedom and in the market in Kazakhstan more generally where opportunities for companies like Freedom to get and make a real success out of a market listing in a leading market, that time has come. I just want to sort of emphasize that point, really.
You mentioned Africa there. One question I do have to ask you. I mean, it is the biggest emerging market on the planet, and it is not all one country, as everyone says. Would you consider looking at emerging markets in Africa where there's a young population?
Yeah, I think for sure because just because of this theory that the competition in finance, in financial services will be global at the end of the day. It will be just not enough to win a competition in Kazakhstan to survive in Kazakhstan. You will have to win a wider competition. Let's take your time. We still have some time because the regulation, national regulation, especially in finance, is very strict. It's not such easy to scale. We already see some disruptions from cryptocurrencies. We already see some globalization of finance, which has happened. I'm sure that we should pay attention also to developing markets. We already have technology in place for this rollout. We don't work at this moment on some specific deals there.
We're carefully watching. I believe that if we will find some opportunities to touch this market in the right way and to better detect the right market also for entrance, there's a lower regulation barriers because sometimes a big problem why fintech is not such developed in Africa is because the regulation prohibits that for some reasons. It's high taxation on transaction. It's some, I don't know, currency regulation, which also limits your activity. At the end of the day, I'm sure that that will be sorted out, and we should be present here.
Quick last word
. Maybe I will just echo to Timur is in our vision, which we adopted by the board of directors. We have two main principles. We talk a lot today about the data-driven ecosystem, financial ecosystem, which we are building as a core in Kazakhstan.
But then we want to expand. Our expansion is probably covered by three circles. The first one is our neighborhood, Central Asia and South Caucasus, then probably Middle East, and then Africa. There can be some business cases, let's say, opportunistic way. In general, we want to build our expertise and to build right partnership in this region, first of all. In these terms, I think Central Asia has become like a big focus for us. Just to remind you, our colleagues here, that Central Asia was a global financial center between the 18th and 12th century. In certain terms, Freedom wants to help in our dreams like make Central Asia great again.
I am afraid that's all we got time for. Thank you very much indeed to my panel. It's been a great discussion. Mr. Timur Turlov, the founder of Freedom. Mr. Philippe Voglier, the non-executive director here in London. Dr. Kairat Kelimbetov, the director, and also Andrew Gamble, the man in the legal game. Thank you very much indeed for all your time and all your expertise. That's all we got time for here in the city of London at the London Stock Exchange. Thanks for joining us.