Head of account management, Instant, Retail Payments and Cards
Kazakhstan is the largest economy in Central Asia. The country has seen robust growth over the last decade of around 4% per year, notwithstanding a global pandemic and conflicts involving neighboring states. In recent years, the country has consistently attracted the highest level of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the region at $370 billion cumulative since 1991, while GDP per head has risen by a third since 2010[1].
Kaspi.kz has led a complete revolution in digital payments over the last decade
As Kazakh consumers become wealthier, their expectations rise – and this is as true in payments and banking as in other areas of life. Kaspi.kz launched in 2014 to offer a range of app-based banking and payments services using the “Super-App” model pioneered by WeChat and AliPay in China. Prior to the launch of Kaspi.kz, electronic payment accounted for just 13% of all transactions in Kazakhstan.
As we’ll see, Kaspi.kz went on to lead a complete revolution in the digital payments landscape between 2014 and the present time.
The Challenge: drive volume and usage, expand functionality
In 2017, following the initial successful growth of an online marketplace and the launch of a Kaspi Gold debit card, Kaspi identified the need to drive additional usage of services, deliver greater functionality and improve overall payment platform performance. Accordingly, two Super-Apps were created, one for consumers and another for merchants. Both are designed to handle a wide range of payments, including P2P instant transfers, online and in-person shopping, travel, e-grocery, government benefits and services, utility payments, loans, instalments, deposits and more.
Kaspi.kz chose to continue expanding its business as well as its partnership with Tietoevry Banking with the goal of adding new functionalities and furthermore improving the performance and stability of its payment platform.
The Solution: close partnership with Tietoevry Banking Card Suite
Kaspi: A Super App for every need
With its Super-App growing in popularity, Kaspi.kz quickly understood the need for system scalability and performance improvements to support explosive demand. Together with a team from Tietoevry Banking, Kaspi.kz undertook performance tests to evaluate the existing system’s stability and limits, as well as identifying any bottlenecks.
An action list was then created based on the complexity of the modernization tasks required and Kaspi’s business priorities. System analysts and architects from Tietoevry Banking provided possible solutions for the identified gaps and change requests as defined by the performance test report. These included setting up Card Suite payment processing traffic balancing to serve Kaspi.kz operations. In turn, this enabled horizontal scalability to ensure high throughput, plus an increase in payment processing throughput, effectively redistributing payment traffic via the bank's load balancer based on service availability information from the system.
Secondly, Tietoevry Banking executed on a program of controlling and sorting process events. In practice, this involved a review of all software process flows, and optimizing these flows – including the application of multi-thread processing.
Finally, Kaspi.kz and Tietoevry Banking worked on an issuing authorization database split, which is currently in its final implementation phase. The database split acts as a fundamental base to support the next huge performance improvement project that Kaspi.kz and Tietoevry Banking are working on. The main target of this project is to improve system performance and scalability and to prevent any limits on the number of processed transactions per second through a process known as database sharding.
The main target of this project is to improve system performance and scalability and to prevent any limits on the number of processed transactions per second through a process known as database sharding
Benefits and results: payment system in Kazakhstan
If electronic payments stood at just 13% of all transactions in 2016, then today Kaspi.kz stands at the forefront of digital payments in the country. In 2024 over 75% of the Kazakh population use the Kaspi.kz Super App.
As the basis for Kaspi.kz card issuing, acquiring and settlement, Tietoevry Banking’s card platform helps Kazakhs make all kinds of payments and transfers, as well as servicing merchant POS terminals, including card and QR-code payments, and ATMs. Tietoevry Banking’s card platform is also integrated to the Kaspi.kz application and marketplace, acquiring and managing all of its transactions.
Tietoevry Banking’s card platform supports more than 1500 transactions per second (tps) in an average stream. The platform has performed more than 5000 tps at peaks.
[1] All statistics in this paragraph drawn from the Kazakh Central Statistics Agency, QazStat: https://stat.gov.kz/
Find out more about how Tietoevry Banking’s card platform can revolutionize retail payments for your bank.