Kaspi.kz and Tieto Banktech: Powering a paytech revolution

Kaspi.kz has led a complete revolution in the digital payments landscape in Kazakhstan. It 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. This has served the new needs of wealthier Kazakh consumers. 

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.

With its Super-App growing in popularity, Kaspi.kz quickly understood the need for system scalability and performance improvements to support explosive demand, and chose to continue expanding its business as well as its partnership with Tieto Banktech.

Together with a team from Tieto Banktech, Kaspi.kz undertook performance tests to evaluate the existing system’s stability and limits, as well as identify 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 Tieto Banktech 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 increased payment processing throughput, effectively redistributing payment traffic via the bank's load balancer based on service availability information from the system.

Secondly, Tieto Banktech 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 Tieto Banktech worked on an issuing authorization database split, which is currently in its final implementation phase and supports the next major performance improvement project that Kaspi.kz and Tieto Banktech are working on. The main target of this project is to improve system performance and scalability and to prevent limits on the number of processed transactions per second through a process known as database sharding.

As the basis for Kaspi.kz card issuing, acquiring and settlement, Tieto Banktech’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. 

Tieto Banktech’s card platform is also integrated into Kaspi.kz application and marketplace, acquiring and managing all its transactions.

If electronic payments stood at just 13% of all transactions in Kazakstan 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.