In 2026, user loyalty will have become one of the most important business assets, as companies increasingly seek ways to monetize it. The trust economy influences customer behavior: consumers are willing to buy from trusted brands, even when their products are more expensive than competitors’. In this environment, ecosystems gain an advantage: they combine fintech and lifestyle services, meet customers’ everyday needs, and turn trust into repeat transactions, cross-selling, and long-term customer retention.
The Trust Economy: Reputation as Capital
In 2026, trust is becoming an economic factor. According to PwC, 46% of consumers increased purchases from companies they trust, while 28% paid a premium to buy from them. Edelman’s Brand Trust research found that, when trust is present, 59% of consumers are more likely to buy a brand’s new products or choose that brand even if it is not the cheapest option.
In an article on the trust economy, ByTheMag puts it this way: in the digital environment, reputation “moves faster than advertising,” because consumers can compare brands, read reviews, examine a company’s practices, and, within seconds, assess whether a business keeps its promises.
This changes the logic of competition: marketing remains important, but it can no longer create sustainable loyalty on its own.
The key elements of the trust economy are transparency, social proof, a consistent customer experience, and a company’s ability to acknowledge mistakes. What matters is not only the product or price, but also how the brand behaves publicly, how it protects data, how it responds to complaints, and how consistently it communicates with customers.
For businesses, this means loyalty can be viewed as an asset. A customer who trusts a company returns more often, tries new products, and is less expensive to retain and easier to upsell to. Trust affects not only the brand but also revenue, margins, and the overall value of the customer base.
How Ecosystems Monetize Loyalty
An ecosystem is a model in which a company offers customers multiple connected services within a single digital environment: payments, loans, investments, insurance, shopping, travel, entertainment, telecom, and content. What matters is not the number of products, but the connections between them. The more scenarios a platform covers, the more frequently it interacts with the customer and the more insight it gains into their needs. This makes it possible to recommend the next product more accurately and reduce the cost of cross-selling.
Global examples show how scalable this model can be. Tencent’s WeChat and Weixin had a combined 1.4 billion monthly active users by the end of 2025, while revenue from the FinTech and Business Services segment grew by 8% in 2025 to reach RMB 229.4 billion ($33.7 billion).
By 2026, Revolut had grown to 70 million customers. It reported $6 billion in revenue for 2025 and continues to build a global banking model that combines financial and lifestyle services.
Robinhood, which began as an investment app, generated record revenue of $4.5 billion in 2025, grew its Gold subscriber base to 4.2 million, and is developing banking products, advisory services, and asset management.
Ping An in China shows another version of the ecosystem model – built around insurance, banking, and health and senior care. In 2025, the company reported almost 251 million retail customers, while retention among customers with three or more product categories reached 99%.
Customers tend to show greater loyalty within ecosystems because they receive the convenience of a “one-stop shop,” a single account, quick access to financing, rewards, personalization, and less friction when switching between services. For the company, this means growth in lifetime value: a customer who initially joins for one product may stay for an entire set of use cases.
Freedom Holding’s Ecosystem: Kazakhstan’s Model Within a Global Trend
Freedom Holding Corp. is a U.S.-listed diversified financial services holding company with operations spanning brokerage, investment research, investment banking and underwriting, mortgages, insurance, and consumer banking. The company states that Kazakhstan is its main market and that it operates through subsidiaries in 21 countries.
In its latest available FY2026 results, for the third quarter and nine months ended December 31, 2025, Freedom Holding Corp. reported total revenue of $628.6 million for Q3 FY2026 and $1.68 billion for the first nine months of FY2026. Net income was $76.2 million for the quarter and $145.4 million for the nine-month period. As of December 31, 2025, total assets stood at $12.38 billion, up from $9.91 billion on March 31, 2025.
A key element of the model is the transition from a brokerage business into an everyday-services platform. Freedom SuperApp brings together payments, transfers, cards, deposits, loans, brokerage accounts, insurance, more than 12 public services, and airline and train tickets. The company is also developing a separate social component within the app: Freedom SuperApp is building a media ecosystem and its own social network, as well as the social-commerce platform Freedom Lenta.
“Value is created not in individual products, but in the connections between them. The more points at which you are present in a person’s life, the greater their trust, the deeper their engagement, and the more stable your position. This is what an ecosystem is. Not in the marketing sense – almost every fintech startup uses this word now. But in the real sense: a system where elements reinforce each other and create value that none of them could create individually,” Timur Turlov says.
Freedom Holding Corp. is also focused on expanding its Kazakhstani ecosystem model into other markets. The company has already received a banking license in Georgia and agreed to acquire a bank in Turkey, where it plans to develop its digital ecosystem. Expansion in Europe is also on the company’s agenda.
“This is what we are striving for. Presence in life, not in a transaction. Of course, this is more difficult than doing just one thing. It requires more competencies, managerial maturity, and, ultimately, more patience. But the potential value created is incomparably higher,” Timur Turlov notes.
