Insights from Timur Turlov
Timur Turlov, the richest person in Kazakhstan, according to Forbes’ World’s Billionaires List, in an exclusive interview with bne IntelliNews, explained the key principles that guided his success from a young trader to the founder and CEO of Freedom Holding Corp. (FRHC), a diversified NASDAQ-listed digital ecosystem with operations in over 20 countries.
Think Strategically Like in Chess
Timur Turlov is literally a chess player: he grew up with a passion for the game and taught his kids to play. In January 2023, he became president of the Kazakhstan Chess Federation, and in 2024, he was appointed head of the International School Chess Federation (ISCF), a FIDE-affiliated organization that promotes chess in education worldwide.
Throughout 2023 and 2024, under his leadership, Freedom Holding Corp. repeatedly supported major international chess tournaments, such as the World Schools Team Championship, FIDE World Rapid and Blitz Chess Championships, and others.
For Timur Turlov, chess is more than a sport—it is a model for strategic thinking in business. Chess is all about seeing openings and making bold moves with a long-term plan of attack. Sacrifice and risk-taking are at the heart of the game. Turlov has built his career on similar principles. He said this in the interview with bne IntelliNews.
Learn Every Aspect of Business
During the early years of his career in financial services, while working in the brokerage division of Russian Uniastrum Bank, Turlov tried to understand every detail of financial operations. He was involved in every aspect and stated in the interview that he knew every single operation in accounting, corresponding relationship risk, sales, trading, customer service, marketing, and customer education.
This knowledge let him build his own company from scratch. He reflects: “It was like a startup inside the bank, and it finally turned into this kind of spin-off when I assembled my first team of six people, and we tried to replicate all that business outside of the bank.”
Reinvest the Profit
After Freedom started earning, Timur Turlov took all the profits and reinvested them in the business, he said in the interview. This principle—“reinvest, rather than rest”—is one the businessman still follows even now, when the business has EBITDA of hundreds of millions of dollars.
The financial statements of Freedom Holding Corp. prove this point: operating costs are almost equal to revenues as the group expands into new sectors. Thus, for the quarter ended 30th of June 2025, expenses amounted to $492.9 million and revenue was $533.4 million.
Think In Ecosystems
Due to these steady reinvestments, Freedom Holding Corp. from a small brokerage firm has grown into a full-fledged digital conglomerate, with millions of people using its services. Besides brokerage, they include banking, insurance, telecom, media, e-commerce, and others.
When the group first started building its presence in different industries, the market responded with skepticism. But time proved that the strategy was right. Traditional retail banking, brokerage, and fintech services are giving way to the whole gamut of things people need to manage their entire life, not just their money, Turlov explained in the interview. In his opinion, all the competition is not between standalone companies. It’s not between offline and online. It’s just between ecosystems.
Digitalize It
“We’re going through this very big digital transformation…” Turlov remarked. He prioritizes digital platforms and technology to create competitive advantages for the group.
The milestone is the Freedom SuperApp, which brings together banking, brokerage, insurance, e-commerce, travel booking, and streaming services. This allows Freedom to reduce its customer acquisition cost.
Freedom Holding Corp. also leverages Kazakhstan’s advanced digital government systems to offer fully digital financial services—including unsecured loans, car loans, and mortgages—with no need for in-person meetings.
Expand Horizons
Freedom Holding Corp. not only invests in a variety of sectors but also actively increases its geographical reach. Its physical expansion began in Kazakhstan in 2011, as it sought its own niche and a less competitive market. “In that period of time, I could see that actually we were not much more competitive than most of our competitors. They were better known, much more reputable, had much better IT solutions, much better people, and a longer history of operations,” Turlov said in the interview. “One of my friends advised me to go to Kazakhstan.”
It worked. Within a year, the business in Kazakhstan was up and running, selling access to US stocks to retail investors. Turlov moved his family to Almaty. Now the headquarters of the group and the epicenter of the business are in Kazakhstan. The holding has a presence in more than 20 countries through its subsidiaries.
Follow Your Dream
In his youth, Timur Turlov had a particular passion for Hollywood films that showed the comfort and prosperity that capitalism could produce—especially the get-rich-quick Wall Street movies. “Usually, the wealthy characters in Hollywood movies were involved in the stock market,” he said. The American market became his dream, and he steadily followed it.
Timur Turlov began his career as an intern at the Moscow branch of the US firm World Capital Investments at the age of 16. Later, his first full-time job at Uniastrum Bank also had a focus on the United States market. Freedom, when it was just founded, offered clients opportunities to invest in the American stock market. And finally, FRHC was listed in New York on the Nasdaq in 2019, and Turlov himself became a billionaire. In January 2021, the company entered the NYSE by acquiring broker-dealer Prime Executions for $2.5 M, and gained direct access to the US market.
Face the Problems
The Nasdaq listing was a big achievement for Freedom Holding Corp., but it also brought problems such as public criticism. Two years after the IPO, an aggressive research firm accused the company of risky practices involving FFIN Belize, a brokerage owned by Turlov that handled many U.S. trades.
The businessman did not shy away from problems. He explained that FFIN Belize was set up legally to process trades for Kazakh and Russian clients, because local regulations didn’t allow electronic trading in Kazakhstan at the time. There were no sanctions on U.S.-Russia investments then. The setup helped route billions of dollars into U.S. markets.
“Was it a significant scandal? It knocked 3% off our share price for a short while, and it was very stressful, but it didn’t disrupt our fundamental business,” he said in the interview. “Our credit ratings were never lowered or put on a negative outlook by the likes of S&P, etc. Finally, our credit rating is much higher than it was then.”
