Neural networks are forming their own preferences in Kazakhstan’s financial services market. A joint study by the Zvonko project and the Bank.kz portal showed that algorithms most often recommend products from Kaspi.kz, Halyk Bank, and ForteBank. Artificial intelligence relies on press coverage rather than official data from the financial institutions themselves.
What happened
The study authors analyzed 902 responses from five popular AI models: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Alisa. The prompts involved choosing among 23 Kazakh banks to open a deposit, get a card, or take out a mortgage.
Kaspi.kz scored 66 out of 100 possible points in the testing. Halyk Bank took second place with 62 points, followed by ForteBank (60 points) and Alatau City Bank (59 points). Almost half of the market players are practically unmentioned in the results.
Methodology and data sources
This is an information visibility ranking, not a measure of financial reliability or service quality. A major player can lose ground to a small bank if external resources write about the latter more often.
Algorithms judge products primarily by directories and articles in business media like Kursiv and Forbes. Direct links to official bank websites made up only 17% of the neural networks’ responses.
Why it matters
Bank marketing traditionally focuses on search engine optimization (SEO) and direct advertising. The rising popularity of AI search engines changes how banks attract clients. Users increasingly ask chatbots complex financial questions, expecting a ready-made comparative analysis.
If a bank is not mentioned in reputable media, it drops off the algorithms’ radar. Financial institutions will have to rebuild their PR strategies so their products and rates end up in the training datasets of large language models.
What’s next
The market has a new competition channel. Banks need to learn how to manage their digital footprint in the databases used to train neural networks. This requires closer work with aggregators, business publications, and review platforms.
Finteqstan previously reported that ForteBank introduced single QR payments and Kaspi.kz completed the purchase of a bank in Turkey. Regular product and corporate news like this creates the dense information background that algorithms read and use when answering users.
