Permission to serve: Beyond the Superapp

“Technology alone is becoming easier to replicate. Yes, it creates capability, but trust creates permission.” 

That principle informs Evgenii Tiapkin’s approach as CEO of Freedom24, the European arm of Nasdaq-listed Freedom Holding Corp., which he describes as a ‘neo-traditional financial institution’.

“The ‘traditional’ part reflects values that will never change in finance: trust, regulation, governance, long-term responsibility and local relevance,” he says. “The ‘neo’ reflects how technology allows those foundations to be delivered in a far more connected and intuitive way.”
A standalone EU-licensed investment and technology platform with more than 600,000 EU/EEA clients, Freedom’s proprietary technology, Tradernet was originally launched in 2008 to allow people in Eastern Europe and Central Asia to access global capital markets. In Kazakhstan, the company’s largest operational market, it is fully integrated into the Freedom SuperApp, a popular financial and lifestyle platform  – and Freedom24 is the foundation on which the same concept is being built in Europe. 

For Tiapkin, the starting point for that is not technology but the way customers think about money.

“Historically, financial services were organised around products, and customers were expected to combine these services themselves, often across multiple providers,” he says. “Today, people don’t think in terms of products. They think about buying a home, building wealth, protecting their families or planning retirement. Financial products are simply tools that help achieve those goals.”

That has implications for the traditional boundaries between banks, brokers and fintech companies.

“I don’t think banks, brokers or fintechs disappear. I think the boundaries between them become increasingly irrelevant from the customer’s perspective,” Tiapkin says. “People don’t wake up wanting another investment account or another banking application. They want to achieve something. They want an outcome, not a process.”

Tiapkin is keen, however, to distinguish the Freedom SuperApp from the familiar model of bringing lots of financial products together to slop around separately in one application.

“A superapp isn’t simply an application with many buttons. It is an operating model first and foremost. It is about connecting services so naturally that customers no longer need to manage the complexity themselves,” he says.

“Banking supports investing. Payments support saving. Insurance supports long-term financial resilience. The ambition is to make those connections useful rather than simply add more choice.

“And success won’t be measured by how many products a company offers, but by how little effort customers need to achieve their everyday goals.” Freedom Holding Corp. has announced plans to pursue a banking licence in the EU as part of its European expansion strategy, which includes investing €500million to launch a digital bank and develop local infrastructure.
At the announcement in June, Tiapkin said: “We want to move beyond the traditional brokerage model. We see the next stage of growth in Europe not only in expanding brokerage services, but also in building a broader client ecosystem around them.

“In this context, we are focusing on several areas, with banking services as a key priority.”

Tiapkin describes banking as ‘infrastructure’ because of the increasing role it plays across people’s financial lives.
"Income arrives there. Payments begin there. Savings accumulate there. Naturally, many long-term financial decisions originate there as well,” he says.

“Customers don’t think in organisational charts. They don’t separate today’s payment from tomorrow’s investment or next year’s mortgage. They expect their financial life to work coherently.”

Integrating them, however, impacts the controls around each moving part. This is where a ‘neo-traditional financial institution’ needs ‘neo compliance’ baked in from the start.

“Compliance can no longer operate only as a control function,” says Tiapkin. “It has to become part of how the organisation is designed.”

Rather than checking decisions after they have been made, compliance needs to be built into products, processes and customer journeys. Freedom uses AI to automate repetitive activity, identify unusual patterns and strengthen monitoring.

Used responsibly, AI can help identify patterns in huge volumes of transaction history and customer information that would be difficult for humans to spot and allow organisations to respond earlier to potential risks.

But that also places greater emphasis on governance. The more decisions are supported by automated systems, the more important it becomes to understand how those systems operate, where human oversight is required and who remains accountable for the outcome.

“The deeper transformation is organisational,” says Tiapkin. “I believe our competitive advantage as a broker lies in the fact that we were able to have compliance, technology and the business evolving together as a single organisation rather than separately.”.
Freedom continues to invest in developing its proprietary multi-asset platform and brokerage ecosystem Tradernet. It provides retail and institutional clients with online access to global stock exchanges, real-time market data, portfolio management tools and social investor networking tools. But technology is only part of the proposition.

As Tiapkin puts it: “Customers don’t entrust their savings to an institution because it has the newest algorithm. They do so because they believe it will protect their interests consistently over many years while providing a high level of service.” That helps explain why Freedom24 continues to invest in local offices and relationship managers across Europe.

“One of the biggest misconceptions is that digital transformation is about replacing people. I don’t think it is, because finance is an exceptionally sensitive and personal area, where technology should remove friction, not relationships,” says Tiapkin.

“When people are making important financial decisions – investing their savings, planning for retirement or preparing for major life events – they are looking for confidence as much as convenience. A relationship manager who understands the local market context brings judgement and accountability in a way technology alone cannot.”

For a business operating across Europe, the local element presents its own challenge. Financial cultures and customer expectations vary considerably, as do attitudes to risk, language, investment habits and the pace of digital adoption.

“Building a European financial institution doesn’t mean treating every market the same,” agrees Tiapkin. “It means creating a consistent standard of technology, governance and customer experience while remaining genuinely relevant at the local level.
“Crucially, innovation can be developed centrally, but trust is built locally.”

The same applies to financial education. Tiapkin believes the industry has often made the customer experience unnecessarily complicated by assuming consumers want to understand the machinery behind every financial decision.
“One of the biggest challenges in financial services today is that we often assume customers want to become financial experts,” he says. “In reality, most people simply want to make good decisions without having to navigate unnecessary complexity.

“If we can anticipate customer needs, simplify processes and preserve trust associated with conventional financial frameworks, we can help people build better financial habits naturally.

“Investing, for example, should not feel like a separate activity reserved for specialists. Over time, it should become a natural extension of everyday financial life.”

That shift could also change how financial institutions think about engagement. Instead of measuring success through the number of logins, products purchased or transactions completed, the emphasis moves towards whether customers are making better decisions and achieving their objectives.

Tiapkin says its ambition is to deepen the relationships with its 600,000 European customers so far by making financial services work together more intelligently, automating where technology genuinely adds value, while retaining people where judgement, accountability and relationships matter most. How successful it is in doing that ‘will not be measured by how often customers open our app or how many products they use. It will be measured by whether we help them achieve better financial outcomes with less effort’.