Despite tight monetary policy, Turkey’s stock market continues to grow. The total market capitalization of companies listed on Borsa Istanbul stood at 15.51 trillion Turkish lira ($361 billion) at the end of 2025. By comparison, the market capitalization of equities listed on the Kazakhstan Stock Exchange grew by 18.7% in 2025 to 39 trillion tenge, equivalent to roughly $83 billion.
In 2025, Timur Turlov’s Freedom Holding Corp. obtained a brokerage license in Turkey: the company launched operations under the Freedom Yatırım brand, which Timur Turlov described as possibly the first new brokerage license issued to a foreign broker in the country in 20 years.
Turkey’s capital markets are built around Borsa Istanbul – a unified exchange platform where equities, debt securities, derivatives, precious metals and other assets are traded. Its key benchmark is the BIST 100, an index of the country’s 100 largest and most liquid companies. In 2025, the market operated in a challenging environment: high interest rates limited lending activity, but at the same time supported investor interest in securities as a way to preserve capital amid inflation and lira volatility.
The main structural feature of Turkey’s stock market is the strong role of retail investors. Average monthly active investor accounts have almost doubled over five years: from 1.5 million in 2021 to 2.6 million by the end of 2025. At the end of last year, Turkish individual investors owned about 30% of all shares listed on Borsa Istanbul by value. For a broker, this is an important signal: the market is no longer dominated solely by institutional investors, and the client base is already accustomed to managing investments independently.
At the same time, the primary market has become more selective. In 2025, 18 companies completed IPOs in Turkey, raising a combined 43.9 billion Turkish lira, or about $1.1 billion. This was less than in 2024, when 34 companies went public and raised 59.5 billion Turkish lira, and significantly below the 2023 peak, when 54 issuers sold shares worth 79.3 billion Turkish lira.
One reason was the tightening of requirements by Turkey’s Capital Markets Board: for companies planning IPOs in 2025, minimum requirements for share capital, assets and revenue were raised, along with minimum market-capitalization requirements for listing in the Stars, Main and Sub-Market segments. As a result, mainly larger and more resilient companies listed on the exchange. This IPO pattern points to a maturing market: the regulator is effectively filtering out weaker issuers, while investors are being offered companies with clearer scale and financial resilience.
Freedom Holding Corp. entered Turkey through its brokerage business. In January 2025, the holding announced that Turkey’s Capital Markets Board had approved the creation of the brokerage company Freedom Yatırım Menkul Değerler JSC via its subsidiary Freedom Financial Services Inc. In its official statement, the company emphasized that Turkey would become a new market for the holding’s investment services.
Freedom Holding’s strategy in Turkey goes beyond traditional brokerage. Freedom Holding Corp. is not only offering access to exchanges, but also pursuing an ecosystem model: it plans to integrate brokerage, banking, investment products, insurance, payments and lifestyle services into a single digital environment. The holding is currently in the process of acquiring 99.32% of the shares of Turkish Bank A.Ş.
Freedom’s history explains why this strategy is a natural fit for the company. The holding was founded by Timur Turlov in 2008, and in October 2019 its shares were listed on the Nasdaq Capital Market under the ticker FRHC. Today, Freedom Holding Corp. shares are traded on Nasdaq, KASE and AIX, while the group, according to the company, operates in 21 countries, including Kazakhstan, the United States, Cyprus, Poland, Spain, Uzbekistan and Armenia. Freedom’s market capitalization exceeded $8.5 billion.
Freedom Holding Corp’s financial performance also gives it the resources to expand. For the first nine months of fiscal 2026, Freedom Holding reported net revenue of $1.69 billion and net income of $145.4 million. Its brokerage client base reached 828,000 as of December 31, 2025, an increase of 145,000 over nine months, while the number of banking clients grew by 2 million, reaching 4.5 million.
This combination could give Freedom Holding a competitive advantage in Turkey. Turkey already has a large base of digital financial-services users: with a population of about 90 million people, the country has more than 120 million registered digital banking accounts. For Freedom, this means that the company will not need to introduce the SuperApp concept from scratch: Turkish users are already accustomed to mobile banking, online investing and digital payments. The task for Freedom Yatırım is to build on these established user habits and offer customers not merely a standalone brokerage app, but an everyday financial interface.
This strategy aligns with global trends in fintech. Major players are increasingly competing through the breadth of services they provide across the customer journey: investments are linked to payments, loans to insurance, and marketplaces to financial services, while customer-behavior data makes it possible to personalize offers.
For Freedom Holding Corp., Turkey’s stock market is both an opportunity and a test of scalability. The opportunity lies in the market’s size and growth, its active retail investor base, IPO pipeline, bond market and demand for international instruments. It is a test because Turkey remains a complex jurisdiction with a history of high inflation, a strict regulatory environment, and well-established local banks and brokers.
If Freedom Holding can combine its brokerage license, banking infrastructure and SuperApp into a functioning Turkish model, this market will become a showcase for the international expansion of its ecosystem model.
