Mikhail Lomtadze, Kaspi CEO - From Super App to Everyday AI Assistant

0:00Mikhail Lomtadze: I am in Almaty, Kazakhstan, and there's a mountain range that towers over the city. And there's one company that towers over daily life here. It's how this country pays, shops, borrows money, and even files its taxes. It's called Caspi. And there's one energetic man leading the operation. Caspi CEO, Mikhail Lomtadze.

0:24Miguel Armaza: If you work sort of backwards, if you think the company is, let's imagine it's a box, right? which needs to produce some result. Well, in our case, that box have to produce really happy consumers. That's the final result we're looking for. And then everything inside, people, resources, systems, data, IT, they're supposed to work in order to produce happy consumers.

0:46Mikhail Lomtadze: That is the entire philosophy of one of the most successful tech companies on earth. Delight your customers and build products they want.

0:56Miguel Armaza: If consumer doesn't like a product, you kill it. If consumer is not getting service fast enough, you speed it up and you never think in terms of your own internal limitations.

1:05Mikhail Lomtadze: You've heard me talk about Caspi before. I hosted their co-founder and CEO a couple of years back in New York City at Nasdaq. And well, a lot has changed since we last spoke. They're expanding into Turkey, revenue has doubled and they just launched a new AI assisted product.

1:25Miguel Armaza: Turkey gives us that platform because they have the manufacturing base and because they have items which they produce. Combined with the technology that we have, now we have items we can sell and we have a technology to help us to sell those items.

1:39Mikhail Lomtadze: It's hard to explain just how dominant and loved Caspi's super app is in this market. We have 20 million people in the country and over 15 million of them are using Caspi on a daily basis. and the app handles about two-thirds of the country's e-commerce.

1:58Miguel Armaza: I mean, if you think about what company is producing, like in terms of final outcome, it's everything from food, clothing, electronics, to actually paying in the store, savings account, you know, your digital documents, you can get married, you know.

2:11Mikhail Lomtadze: Caspi is one of the most admired and impressive tech companies in the world. And today we're going to find out how exactly are they doing it. Let's go. So, Mihael, thank you for the invitation to Kazakhstan. Yeah, thank you for coming over. It's great to have you here. I want to show you something before we get started. So, we recorded an episode two years ago, right? Uh-huh. And you said this. You will have a lot of listeners in Kazakhstan now. Great. Then I will visit and next time we'll record in Kazakhstan. You are invited.

2:47Miguel Armaza: And you can actually see our services. I think you will be shocked. That's on the record. Agreed.

2:53Mikhail Lomtadze: So you're a man of your word. I can tell you're a man of your word. And since I'm visiting all the way from New York, I have a gift for you. Oh, thank you. This is one of the few distilleries from New York City, actually around the corner from my place.

3:10Miguel Armaza: Excellent. Thank you. I hope you enjoy it. I'll have some great Georgian toast with it.

3:14Mikhail Lomtadze: All right. All right. We can put it back so you don't forget it afterwards. Thank you. Thanks for the invitation, especially on this big week for Caspi. And we're definitely going to talk about Casper, which is the great new product that you just launched about 12 hours ago. Correct. So let's start talking about AI because that's what Casper is all about. Specifically, I want to talk about your product development process. How has it changed? Because last time we spoke, you mentioned to me that you take about three to six months to develop a product before launching. You write a three-page memo that anyone outside of Casper with no technical knowledge could understand.

4:05Mikhail Lomtadze: What is the same, what has changed in an era where software is much easier and faster to build?

4:12Miguel Armaza: Actually, developing Casper also took around nine months. You know, every sort of big product when we launch and the big, I mean like our e-commerce, travel, developing super app, like really big products. That's usually takes around nine months. It's just a interesting fact, you know, the way that we're coming up with the, with the new products in terms of the, in terms of the new direction and the AI and what has been changing. I mean, we have been using AI as a technology internally, but I think the future, especially for us, is whoever can crack and develop the consumer-facing functionality.

4:50Miguel Armaza: When you think internally, and we can spend time, but it's always about the productivity and, you know, you can do more with less people or with the same people, more productivity. In case of the consumer-facing interfaces, I think this is where the huge potential is. And there are a lot of different experiments various companies are doing. We have decided that we have developed the business, which is the everyday super app. So our consumers are making 80 transactions a month with us. So we have all this range of services. You can buy anything. You can pay for anything. You can book your travel, government services, groceries.

5:27Miguel Armaza: is so we have this huge range of the services in a single mobile application. So the kind of target we're setting up for ourselves is can we become the everyday AI assistant from everyday super app. And that's what we think is our final destination. Now we're just developing this first step when we have taken the specific use case where we can deliver the most value but also build the trust with the consumers and develop the shopping experience with Kasper, our AI assistant, but then we'll scale him into other everyday tasks.

6:02Mikhail Lomtadze: About a month or two ago, I sat down with Max Lefchen, of course, legendary PayPal co-founder and a firm CEO and founder. And we talked about this topic and he was saying, hey, software has never been the bottleneck or the challenge. The challenge goes way beyond that especially for a marketplace driven product sounds like you agree right it's more about developing that trust with the customers and and solving their problems the software development has never been the most challenging part i mean we are extremely lean

6:43Miguel Armaza: company already so you know nobody can expect from caspy to make these fancy announcements that suddenly we're laying off 10 % of our workforce because we are already lean today. So that's not something which is our priority or is our focus. We're an extremely efficient company with very flat organizational structure. The people that work in the company, those are incredibly talented, dedicated, professionals. So there is not much that we can optimize. Of course, we can speed up, we can increase the productivity with the same number of people, and we're doing this. But I think that when you think like in five, ten years, I mean, the most important is not just how efficiently you are organized as a company.

7:29Miguel Armaza: We will organize. We are already efficient. We'll become more efficient. The question is really who will build the trust with the consumers so that the consumer-facing applications, they deliver the value and simplify actions or help to make better decisions to the consumers and consumers will trust those assistants. So if you think about Casper or whoever is developing the AI consumer-facing capabilities, it's almost like a human. So it's easy to hire, it's easy to fire. So consumers will fire. This is how we internally discuss. So if our Casper, our AI assistant, will not deliver on the promise and the quality of the advice will not be high, consumers will fire.

8:13Miguel Armaza: Very quickly. Very quickly, yes. It's easy. You just go back to the traditional way of searching or buying your items on our marketplace. So this is why we believe that is the most challenging capability. We also believe this is where we have the most competitive advantage and in general competency to build in terms of both, of course, our people and talent, but also the data that we have, the compute capabilities that we have. being on a smaller market is also an advantage. You know, rolling out this capability on the 20 million people market testing and then making it work much easier than if you have hundreds of millions consumers and you run, you can, you will not move even a needle, but you will spend a lot on that base of the consumers.

8:59Miguel Armaza: In our case, I think we just have really a very good case and a strong chance to build, you know, maybe the first consumer facing everyday AI assistant.

9:10Mikhail Lomtadze: Let's talk about that. How does the super app model evolve and change in this new era? Because you're betting on maybe not a completely new interface, but at least a supplemental interface that maybe leads to it changing completely from how people interacted with Caspi a few years ago, a few months ago.

9:32Miguel Armaza: Let's think in terms of human interaction with application, right? Yeah. Just to simplify. So at the moment, the way that we interact with a mobile application is that we look at the screen, we read something, we process this information, and then we make an action with the screen. So we either push the button or we scroll, read again, do the action with the phone, read again. So that's the interaction. What we also know that more interaction is with the screen or more buttons you actually push, the final outcome in terms of consumer conversion into the final product you're trying to sell is reducing.

10:08Miguel Armaza: So again, more actions, more scrolling, more reading is reducing the conversion rates. So when you think about the assistant, actually assistant and the AI technology is enabling us to skip that interaction with the screen and it just goes only one way. So it dramatically reduces number of actions you have to do with the screen. So maybe the screen will not be important in the future, but we're not in a devices business. But actually what will happen is that our assistant dramatically reduces number of actions you have to do to reach the outcome, and that's what will increase the conversion rate.

10:45Miguel Armaza: This sounds maybe sort of simple, but it's really complicated to make sure that actually what you see on the screen is exactly what you need. And that's where our competitive advantage in terms of the data comes in and our ability to make sure that our prediction is highly accurate. So, our capability is actually to predict the outcome. So, that's what the AI is trying to do. So because our quality of data is really good, because a consumer is already in a mobile application, which has all the services inside. There is always payment infrastructure. There is already. We just need to personalize what we call extreme personalization.

11:24Miguel Armaza: We need to personalize it to the extent that, you know, when you ask your assistant to do something, he understands what you want. He knows you, and then he starts offering you the outcomes, solutions, decisions, the products, or any other service that we have with very high accuracy. And that's where is our strategy.

11:44Mikhail Lomtadze: In the past, not long ago, I think last year, you publicly commented that while we have a lot of innovation happening on AI, at the same time, you see clear signs of bubble-like behaviors from some companies. has your thinking changed a little bit on this?

12:04Miguel Armaza: Yeah, well, I think I wouldn't be the only one. I wouldn't be the only one. I think where is the hype? Yeah. You know, there is always overinvestment. So this is not, I mean, I'm not going to win the Nobel Prize with the States. I mean, everybody is. It's definitely overinvestment. Hype means that, you know, people are betting on different companies. Now it's sort of the, how should I say, the game of numbers. You know, I bet on 100 companies. And I hope, you know, at least one out of 10 or 20 will be successful. So definitely hype, definitely overinvestment and being highly confident that most of the companies will be, because it's a hype, will be unsuccessful, will go bust.

12:45Miguel Armaza: But there is no doubt from our side that the technology itself is really remarkable because the technology, I think we don't even know, you know, how things will develop in the five or 10 years, but, you know, we truly believe that this technology will change the way we interact with the devices. I mean, we are a consumer company. That's why consumer-facing products are extremely important for us. That's why we talk less about the operational, more about what end consumer will use, like our merchant or our, you know, consumer side of our services. So what we believe is that the whole interaction and the whole, the way that the consumers receive information, the way they make decisions will change.

13:29Miguel Armaza: And because you don't need to interact that much with the devices, we'll also bring some new wave of the devices which are AI-powered for consumers in five or ten years. Now, we keep it simple. We want to develop the AI assistant, which takes so much less effort from you to get to the solution, to the product which you need, and the product which actually fits you the best. It's almost like you go to the store, basically. We treat our assistant as a human. So he's a consultant in a certain thing. So now he's a consultant in terms of your experience. Like in the store, you go to the store and you suddenly ask the person, he gives you simple explanations and he basically tries to help you to make the right purchase for you.

14:08Miguel Armaza: And you don't need to click any buttons, hopefully. Over time, even less, it's purely conversational. So that's what our belief is. And then in the future, you know, it might be a consultant in planning your vacation or your financial consultant, or maybe even your designer, because you don't want to buy a sofa. You know, you want to, you want to, you just bought an apartment and you suddenly want to develop the design. So with this technology, we already see the opportunity of developing these different roles, which are highly specialized. Again, just to take a step back, we're not developing this general assistant, you know, we're not going, we're an extremely focused company.

14:47Miguel Armaza: We want to make sure that the first step we make, it's highly accurate, high quality, and we build the trust. And then step by step, we'll be introducing the new roles for Kasper. Now, his role is extremely specific. He needs to help you to find the right product for you in our e-commerce platform.

15:04Mikhail Lomtadze: And actually, if I think about our past conversation, you're very consistent because I remember you were telling me the number one task for you is about making your consumers, your clients' lives easier. So this is just one more step in that direction. Let's talk about that, right? Because something that's very interesting, I guess, to the followers of the company is that most of the team members within Caspi do not have financial targets, right? They have customer satisfaction targets, net promoter score. Maybe tell us a bit more about this because it's an interesting concept. And then who is responsible for the financial targets?

15:48Mikhail Lomtadze: Is it just you or a couple other members?

15:51Miguel Armaza: Well, I've been in our company and we're constantly sort of improving. So you can achieve this type of constant search for innovation and improvement if you always think in terms of the consumer and you don't think in terms of your company. If consumer doesn't like a product, you kill it. If consumer is not getting service fast enough, you speed it up and you never think in terms of your own internal limitations. So that's why even our AI assistants we're developing. I mean, in most of the other companies, people will say, what's going to happen with our advertising revenue? If they think in terms of the targets, they will say the question number one.

16:30Miguel Armaza: Why Google missed the whole… they're catching up now. I think they're developing really good tools, but they missed the initial spike.

16:39Mikhail Lomtadze: Most companies are afraid to cannibalize their existing financial performance.

16:44Miguel Armaza: And we basically said that if we believe this product is incredibly useful, we would use it ourselves. We really have to double down and just continue developing it. And we need to disrupt ourselves from within. And that's basically how we operate. This type of values in the company to be developed, I think it just takes really more than just the financial. Of course we're not stupid. I mean, we track the financial state, financial metrics. But having the consumer guiding us what to do, that's much more powerful. And this is why most of the units in the company, we care about the consumers and the net promoter score or number of calls you make, the speed of our response.

17:25Miguel Armaza: Those are the metrics which are helping to define whether the consumer is happy or not. And that's our biggest asset. And that's why it's also the biggest and the most important metric for all of us. Now, financial side of things, I mean, of course, we have, I mean, I'm looking at financials as well. It's never a headline discussion, but then, you know, maybe top 15, 20 guys are involved and we, you know, we understand what our financial results would be. And of course we take them responsibly. We don't want to overspend or to make sure we price products appropriately and so on and so forth. So that's definitely part of our strategy building, but that's not something which guides our decision making.

18:06Miguel Armaza: Our decision making is guided by what's the next product we can do, how we can make customers happier, how we can increase, by developing high quality products, we can have more interactions with our consumers. Those are the metrics which are extremely important and they make us profitable. But again, happy consumers interacting with us more frequently and staying with us. This is how we continue growing financially.

18:30Mikhail Lomtadze: Something that came up in one of my conversations yesterday at the launch event of Casper is that you're also focused on the return on time. How do you think about this concept? Life is short, right?

18:43Miguel Armaza: So you just want to make sure the time you spend, you spend on the important things which bring the most value. It does mean that most of us work really hard and we continue working and being excited about things we do. So it's not about working less, but actually how you can continue working hard, but you concentrate on the things which bring the most value. And sometimes things like Casper or where we're launching the payments business or SuperApp, every major service we're launching, sometimes we just start allocating disproportionate amount of time to those new initiatives. Now, the way that companies organize, we're allowed to do it, me and other guys, because let's say two centers of gravitation.

19:30Miguel Armaza: So number one is where the innovations happen, right? So that's products led by the product development team, but it's like where the innovation is, and then the operations. And the operations is where actually we're serving our existing customers with existing products. And our operations team is extremely strong. They care about the consumer. Consumer metrics are the most important metrics for them. And, you know, you are making consumer happy only if repetitive interactions of consumer with you provide desired outcome at a very high quality. And you can lose your consumers if suddenly every repetitive interaction with you becomes, you know, bad quality consumer is not happy.

20:12Miguel Armaza: There's everyday mobile application, you know, 80 transactions a month. In a supermarket business, which now is probably the biggest grocery business in the country, consumers are buying every week. If you screw up the purchase in one of the weeks, it's really tough to bring them back. It's like a never-ending perfection engine. So operational guys delivering so much value with our existing products allow us, on the other hand, you know, being a little bit sort of, you know, crazy and experimented with innovative ideas like, you know, Casper we have launched. I mean, we're lucky that most of the stuff we launch are extremely successful.

20:46Miguel Armaza: So when I say like experimenting, I don't mean like wasting money, you know, we never wasted money and resources and our time is precious. But yeah, so that the operations running like a Swiss watch allows our product teams and the guys to run the innovative side of things.

21:04Mikhail Lomtadze: But I think you're mentioning that most of the products you've launched have been extremely successful. That's no coincidence, right? Your process to prepare for that launch is pretty thorough. Correct. So you come out already ensuring some level of product market fit.

21:23Miguel Armaza: Yeah, I mean, we can take example of the Custer, for example. So when we're thinking about where we can launch this technology, because it has very broad application, you know, like inclination of every smart person is to develop, to solve everything. So we could actually develop the, we could launch the shopping assistant, like, you know, many other companies have done, and we could have done, we'll help you with the search, we'll help you with the selection, we'll help you with the selecting of the items, selecting of the seller, selecting of the shipping method. So, and you can actually go through, and it's possible.

21:59Miguel Armaza: I mean, I'm not saying this is not possible to, you know, through the whole shopping experience, you can help consumer. Consumer always asking a question, what to buy, from who to buy, how to deliver, how to pay. So you can actually respond to every question during the shopping journey. And we could do it. Technology is there and the data capabilities and the models are trained. But actually what we said is what is absolute minimum we can launch. And when we say absolute minimum, that means absolute minimum that will create magic for the consumers. The consumers will get immediate value. But at the same time, we can have this small step, but highly accurate to build the trust.

22:42Miguel Armaza: And we know that in And this will be, you know, whatever, I'm not going to use 100%, but let's say 99.9 % confident that we can deliver value on that specific narrow piece. And this is where we started. So we basically, Kasper now is consulting and helping consumer until the moment that you go to the shopping cart. So he will compare the items, he will give you the reviews, he will summarize the description, give you differences, explain in simple language technical terms. And then eventually, as you push the shopping cart, then traditional e-commerce experience starts. We deliberately took such a simple step because, you know, we can expand in three months.

23:21Miguel Armaza: We can add another step, our shipping method. We can help you to select. We have a range of shipping methods. Payment method, you can select. Salary, you can select. And by adding and making this product, I wouldn't call complicated. I would call more comprehensive. We're dramatically increasing with this approach from extreme simplification to adding the services. We're dramatically increasing the chance of our success. But also, you know, consumers learn together with it. We learn together with it, you know, with development. And step by step, our teams become more experienced. So every single product you take, we always launched.

23:57Miguel Armaza: Every successful product always will launch from extreme simplification to adding the features over the course of consumers using it. And you never know, maybe in three months, consumers will tell us something different. And maybe they will want something different from us. So it's better to start simple and then listen to your consumers what they want.

24:16Mikhail Lomtadze: Since we're talking a little bit about organizational structure, Jensen Juan famously has about 60 direct reports from NVIDIA. Do you structure yourself similarly?

24:27Miguel Armaza: Yeah, well, I mean, I don't think in terms of organizational structure. I mean, of course, you need to have a structure, you need to have job descriptions and things like that. But I always think in terms of the tasks need to be performed and the meetings we need to have to deliver the final result. So I don't think in terms of direct reports, basically. I just interact with anyone that is important to complete the task, that is important to reach the target. And if from that perspective, maybe, I don't know, the better measurement would be number of people I interact during the month, not the direct reports.

24:59Miguel Armaza: Where do you think that number is? It actually would be probably up to 100 people. And these are meaningful interactions? Those are the meetings about this is the product development we have, this is the business results we have achieved with the guys that run the businesses, this is the product we want to launch. I would say two-thirds of the meetings are on the products. Okay. And one third of the meetings is around, okay, great, this is the business performance that we have. And now it's also split between two countries, you know, Kazakhstan and Turkey. So, yeah, so if we take this, there are a lot of new people coming in into this discussion.

25:38Miguel Armaza: So then I would say probably about 10, 20 % of the people would be new. Yeah, every month.

25:44Mikhail Lomtadze: Yeah. That's interesting.

25:46Miguel Armaza: And some instructions really need, like when you have operational discussions, for example, you don't need to meet people every month. You don't really... I mean, you are creating meetings for the sake of the meetings, so you would meet them once in two months or once in a quarter. But my focus is primarily in the direction of where the products are going and how we are going to improve the or you know what's what's our next product or what's our next feature on the product things like that so without a doubt the most interesting event or the most interesting

26:31Mikhail Lomtadze: headline of caspy within the last two years is your international expansion so let's talk a bit about that. You've expanded to Turkey. How's it going? How has the first year with Hepziburada gone? What have you learned?

26:49Miguel Armaza: No, I mean, it's really exciting. You know, we have said that we have this, you know, inspiration of having 100 million user business. And at the moment we have about probably 25 if we combine now Turkey and Kazakhstan. So in our case, We believe that all the ingredients are there. I mean, you know, Turkey is a big market, you know, around 80 million, 90 million people. We have the company and the brand, which is respected and strong. We have, I mean, 18 million users coming to the mobile application monthly, converting into roughly 3, 3.5 million actual buyers of the, on the e-commerce platform.

27:27Miguel Armaza: And our focus really has been mostly just to prepare ourselves and the company towards, you know, adding more services in the future. The reason why we call it prepare is because if you want to, you know, of course our intention is to do what we have done with our Caspi sort of super app strategy. However, to implement that strategy, it's fundamentally important and cannot be compromised that your existing customers have to be super happy. I'm not saying on average happy. I'm not saying happy like any other competitor. I mean, just thrilled, happy, like net promoter score of 80. I mean, those 90, those are...

28:12Miguel Armaza: Because most of the companies have 40, 50, and that's already a very good number. The reason why this is fundamentally important is because if you want to innovate at the speed like we do, you basically need to have this incredibly excited and happy customers with your existing products because you launch the next product and they will use your product only if they are happy with your existing products. And the happier they are, more than they will use your next product. And the reason why it's important, because that's the only way you can build the business, grow the business, but actually make it profitable.

28:48Miguel Armaza: If your customers are average happy, you give them product, some of them use, some of them turn, you're investing into marketing, you're investing into bringing them back. So it's actually cost you much more money. So it's much better to take step back sometimes and say, we have customers which are happy, But we want to make customers, which are, I mean, 90 % MPS customers, which are, you know, just so, so, so happy that they are actually asking you to develop the services. Like nobody could imagine Caspi being, you know, primarily in financial products that would be where we are now. Right. There is no other company.

29:26Miguel Armaza: I mean, there are very few companies that have the same range of the services. And the main reason why we've achieved it is because we always, paranoically, are focused on the customer quality and the happiness. And the same we want to build in our other markets, and Turkey is our priority. So we're working on the things which are related, like we want to increase the speed of delivery. We want to increase the user experience so that the mobile application, particularly our focus, is easier to navigate. We're improving search. We're improving the personalization. We're organizing the data so it's readily available.

29:59Miguel Armaza: So we're doing a lot of background work and we already see results. I mean, companies growing roughly around, depending on the month, around 20 to 25 % order growth now. If you actually look into some public companies on a retail side, we are one of the fastest growing retail companies in Turkey and things like that. But we haven't even started yet. We're working with existing customers, want to make them as happy as humanly possible. And then we'll start innovating. We have been just approved for the bank license, for the bank acquisition, which will enable us actually to launch the financial product.

30:34Miguel Armaza: So really excited. And our team is extremely excited. And we believe that we have enough time in 25 hours. We work to build another market for Kaspi.

30:47Mikhail Lomtadze: So what are the differences between between Kazakhstan and Turkey so far?

30:55Miguel Armaza: Turkey has an extremely powerful small and medium enterprise and manufacturing foundation. So, pretty much most of the items which are sold in Hapsi Burruta are actually produced in Turkey. That's the biggest difference from Kazakhstan. In Kazakhstan, this manufacturing base grows, but still the vast majority of the consumer products, like in our e-grocery, already two-thirds is locally sourced. So that's, for example. But when you think about some other consumer products, especially things like clothing, electronics, and so on, they are brought from outside. So they're imported from other markets.

31:37Miguel Armaza: Like Turkey is one of the biggest in terms of clothing, textile, home items, and so on. So that's the biggest difference. And when we look at the merchants there, they're extremely experienced. They are producing the items which actually they are selling and developing the... And when we started to work on the merchant side, we realized that actually some of the products and services in Turkey are highly applicable to Kazakhstan. And some of the services we develop in Kazakhstan are highly applicable in Turkey. So we've moved one level up and we said, now we're developing the global products. So when you think about our suite of the products, as we develop them, we have global advertising product, we have global marketing, global risk management, data capabilities.

32:22Miguel Armaza: And this is a combination of both capabilities, both from Turkey and from Kazakhstan. So really, really excited because it almost feels that one plus one will be three for us.

32:34Mikhail Lomtadze: And if you think about your very public, very specific 100 million user goal, is Turkey enough? Sounds like you would probably need an additional market to get there.

32:51Miguel Armaza: Turkey gives us that platform because they have the manufacturing base and because they have items which they produce, combined with the technology that we have. Now we have items we can sell, and we have a technology to help us to sell those items. And then if you think, you know, countries around the Turkey, you know, basically those are natural markets for us to consider in the future to expand. Again, it's from Kazakhstan, what we can bring, we can bring technology from Turkey products. And there are two manufacturing centers in this part of the world is China and Turkey. So, Turkey has its own space.

33:25Miguel Armaza: Of course, it's very close to Europe and logistically affordable, both from the quality and the speed. So, that market just gives us an opportunity to start looking outside. But again, for us, we are an extremely focused company. We are focused in Turkey, on our home market. And we want just to transform really happy customers into triple happy customers and merchants. And then we can expand outside of Turkey in the future.

33:54Mikhail Lomtadze: And Turkish consumers with Kazakh consumers? Pretty similar.

33:58Miguel Armaza: Well, similar. You know that they have similar origin. So, extremely sort of related nations. You know, Turkey is one of the biggest travel destinations from Kazakhstan, both for vacation and otherwise. It's shared roots of the same language, actually. Probably, you know, I would say they understand each other when they talk. So 30 to 40 % of the language is very similar. I can hear it. So there are a lot of similarities. The biggest, I think the biggest difference would be that the access to the online services, I think the penetration in Kazakhstan is much higher. Just because of the way that it has been a smaller market.

34:37Miguel Armaza: And I think that's something which we can bring. We can bring extremely sort of, you know, high quality digital mobile services, you know, hopefully can help with increasing the share of sort of cashless economy and things like that. But when you think in terms of the consumer, I would say extremely similar.

34:55Mikhail Lomtadze: So talking about happy customers, one thing that was interesting to me to learn this week is, you know, here instead of Uber, there's Yandex Go, I think is the name. And something I heard is sometimes when Yandex is down, your customers are asking you to launch this product or they're asking you to launch food delivery. Is this something that you've considered?

35:20Miguel Armaza: Yes. We have, Caspi Taxi would be a nice name to have in our portfolio. Yeah. So, but at the same time, we're also thinking in terms of, I mean, is there anything that we can add the value, you know, like, can we do something differently that will create just disproportionate excitement in terms of the, in terms of the consumers and food delivery and taxi, they're interesting markets, interesting businesses, but there are also a lot of players in that market and they do things, you know, very similarly. And we just feel like, you know, I mean, if we would be on the bigger market, we would think we wouldn't do a taxi, we would do a straight-into driverless taxi.

36:01Miguel Armaza: That's the jump we would consider. But going into the market where there's decent quality consumer experience, okay, they have sometimes, as you say, not working properly, but every tech company has here and there some rare issues, hopefully, but still. So, yeah, at this stage, I think we would be thinking more about, you know, what other services can be part of our AI assistant Casper, and that would be our priority. And we wouldn't be thinking about other sort of going out to other verticals by ourselves at our most important priority now is front end of the consumer experience with the AI. And if we crack this, I think, or when we crack this, I think that will deliver the huge value and scalability.

36:49Miguel Armaza: Maybe our AI assistant then will go and ask taxi companies to join and help to book the taxi. So whoever wins the front end of consumer experience with AI will be the one who creates the most value for consumer and for the company itself. And it's interesting to me also just walking around, I've been here a few days trying to live

37:09Mikhail Lomtadze: like a local. And I even went to a gym, which helped me realize that you also have a huge retail base, right? A merchant base that love your product because you're enabling them to capture more customers. Just as an anecdote, I went to a gym, I think a company's called Invictus fitness and they the the CEO found out why I was here and he volunteered without me even asking that he loves your product because it's opening more doors in terms of new clients is this feedback that you receive often it's like you know when when the customers are saying

37:55Miguel Armaza: you know thank you it's it's like a honey on our heart I don't know how to say you know it's like really, you know, something which inspires us to continue, you know, innovating and doing the great things. You know, if we would be in the restaurant, for example, or they would understand that there is, you know, somebody from Cuspi, people usually come over and tell you, thank you. So I think that's the biggest reward we get. In terms of the business side of things, you know, we have two core stakeholders in our ecosystem. We have consumers and we have merchants. And our business, and, you know, one of the layers of our business, I would say, is we actually connect them to.

38:28Miguel Armaza: So we have consumers which are interacting with our services, and we have the merchants which are providing the services to the consumers. You know, we are a tech company. Apart from our grocery business, we don't actually own the services which consumers are using, and apart from financial services where we provide our own money or savings accounts. So we connect them. And our goal is really to make sure this connection is happening as seamlessly as possible. And, you know, our merchants are the ones which need to develop their business. And by developing their business, that means they also deliver more services to our consumers.

39:05Miguel Armaza: And again, this connection just helps us. If they both grow, you know, this is how our company grows. So, they both are equally important for us. And we have, you know, separate product suites for the consumer products and for the merchant products. And again, our goal in the merchants, like, you know, there was a, we had a huge argument the other day in our office with the guys and the team. And you know, you know, what was the fight about? The fight was about how we can, you know, how we can continue developing our services, but the fees which merchants are paying to us is less. And also fight was not about how it can be, it was the opposite direction, you know?

39:45Miguel Armaza: So we were like pretty much screaming, screaming at each other, like, okay, how we can do it better, how we can do it more efficiently from our side, how we can drive the costs of the merchants, the fees they're paying also down so that they can continue growing and become more profitable. So the conversation we had is how we can make the merchants working with us more profitable. I don't know how many e-commerce marketplaces you have, like guys are fighting about how we can make our merchants more profitable rather than how we can make ourselves more profitable. Right. It's usually the opposite.

40:21Miguel Armaza: It's usually the opposite. Constantly increasing the fees and increasing the prices is some of the most painful decisions that if we have to take, those are really painful.

40:31Mikhail Lomtadze: Let's talk a bit about your investor base. Because just a few months ago, there was this big announcement and it's related to something you mentioned to me a couple of years ago, and it was, we talk about the companies that you most admire. A few companies came up, but number one, you mentioned WeChat. The company behind WeChat is Tencent. Tencent just became an important shareholder in Caspi, obviously very strategic. Tell us a bit about this step and also what are you hoping to learn from Tencent?

41:06Miguel Armaza: I mean, Tencent is, you know, as far as I'm concerned, is a pioneer of the SuperApp business model. So they have been the first ones and the biggest ones in the truly SuperApp, which means a single mobile application with a lot of services integrated into it. So that's, you know, example which we followed and learned from. In general, we're paranoically learners. That's another thing which I think helps us to keep going. And so it's a great testament, I think, to our business model that they have decided to invest. You know, from their side, this is the group which is doing investments in many other companies as well.

41:43Miguel Armaza: So we just hope that, you know, we'll be able to, you know, just learn really more. And, you know, apart from interacting with the Tencent as one of the key investors, but also maybe work around and learn about some of the specific business lines they have on their side. because definitely there are things we can learn, which I still believe that I think we'll launch our, you know, Casper AI assisted more successfully than they will do. So maybe there is something they can learn from us, but it's a great company and we would love to interact with them, you know, closely and learn from their experiences as well.

42:18Mikhail Lomtadze: Another thing I wanted to ask you about, your revenue has nearly doubled in the last couple of years. The stock price has not. What do you think the market misunderstands? What do you think the market is not seeing about Gaspi?

42:32Miguel Armaza: It's a reflection of the fact that nobody expected a company like this to be born from Kazakhstan. And then nobody would realize that a company like this and the size can be built in 20 million people market. So those were the challenges which were reflected in our stock price as a single market company. And, you know, from our perspective, I'm not, you know, I think the stock is the stock, which has different limitations or factors that influence it. We're focused on operations. So we believe that if we execute, if we continue executing like we've historically done, if we're successful and when we're successful with our consumer facing AI capabilities, we will start sharing a bit more how it works also on the internal services inside the company.

43:20Miguel Armaza: and we are successful in showing and replicating this business model in the Turkey, the stock will follow. I think we will continue explaining our business, but what we need to be focused on is the performance, just showing that we can bring this business model to another bigger market. And then I think there will be people that will believe that's possible.

43:46Mikhail Lomtadze: It looks to me like investors are not giving you credit for the turkey market yet. Correct. That's what I think, too.

43:56Miguel Armaza: Yeah.

43:57Mikhail Lomtadze: Obviously, that's...

43:58Miguel Armaza: They're underestimating our capabilities to execute. But you're used to that. I've been running this company for 20 years with no external funding, so... Of course, I've used... People, you know, investors don't realize this company went where it is now. It never had external investment into the company, so it grew organically. And because it grew organically, this is why we always take it step by step. We're always planning. We want to be this company, be a 100 million user company, multiple markets, and we have 10 years, 5 years. This is the horizon we're talking about. So whoever wants to buy and flip and whatever, that's fine.

44:37Miguel Armaza: That's the market. but we have tenure planned in our heads and we just will put our heads down and just execute.

44:45Mikhail Lomtadze: So if you think of the big tech leaders or actually not just tech leaders, just people, leaders in general, who is one you deeply admire and why?

44:55Miguel Armaza: Well, I mean, in general, I work on a specific cases. You know what I mean? It's like I have a very realistic view, so I don't idealize anyone apart from my parents. And so from that perspective, I would say there are specific things which I like to read about and learn. Like, you know, Steve Jobs would be obviously the one just because of the simplification, you know, and care about the consumers and the way the structure was built. Actually, some of the things about like a directly responsible individual and directly responsible teams is actually an idea which we learned on Apple example. And then on another extreme, you know, would be Elon Musk who would, you know, we'll be flying people to Mars and building data centers in space and how you can actually, you know, talk about certain things, which are extremely difficult to imagine today.

45:47Miguel Armaza: That would be another example of someone who is extremely interesting to follow. And then, of course, there are all usual, you know, not the usual, but a lot of interesting people in between those two extremes. But we also, you know, basically following means learning something specific, you know, like what the companies are doing differently, how they're producing the product, you know, how they're positioning their brands and things like that. So we're always are focused on learning something, you know, specific about each company. But those two would be an extreme example.

46:20Mikhail Lomtadze: Yeah, yeah.

46:21Miguel Armaza: Extreme simplification, consumer care, and flying to Mars. So the two examples, which I find very interesting. Yeah.

46:29Mikhail Lomtadze: And your answer reminds me of what you told me about reading books two years ago, and you're like, you're very specific. You have a task, and then you find the books for that task, right? So with your, I guess, the people you admire, you take a similar approach, right? You admire maybe someone for one specific thing they did, and you learn about it. Correct. Yeah. I wanted to ask you maybe a last, a bit of a personal question. With all the success that you've had and the growth and the size of Caspi, that has followed with tremendous financial returns, right? How is your approach to money and wealth?

47:12Mikhail Lomtadze: Because it seems to me that that's not what drives you because you seem pretty focused.

47:17Miguel Armaza: I have no approach. I think I've just focused on the, you know, I think I would be, you know, the very happy person if I would be sitting in the office, interacting with our team and drawing the products and traveling less. But of course I have to, you know, probably about, you know, David Ferguson, my colleague is helping with investor relations, but I still have to, to interact with investors. But, you know, I would be much more happier if I work with my team and, and think about how to make consumers happy and don't spend my time on anything else really.

47:52Mikhail Lomtadze: Mikhail, thank you for welcoming me to this wonderful, wonderful country. Thank you for coming over.

47:59Miguel Armaza: It's really great to have you here. Yeah, thank you.

48:02Mikhail Lomtadze: Spacier. Thanks for tuning in and I hope you enjoyed this great episode in Kazakhstan with Mikhail Lamtadze from Caspi. If you want more interviews, make sure to subscribe, follow, and leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your shows. It helps and means a lot. And if you have any suggestions or thoughts about the show, just drop me a line on LinkedIn. See you next time.

48:46Thank you.