Papara's Rise: The Numbers Behind Turkey's Biggest Fintech

There is a number that tells you more about Turkey's digital payments revolution than any industry report or conference keynote: the estimated aggregate balance held in Papara accounts on any given day across the platform's over 20 million users runs into the billions of TL, a figure that exceeds the total deposits at several mid-sized Turkish banks. Papara did not become Turkey's largest fintech company by accident. It did so by building a consumer payments platform that achieved genuine mass adoption, the kind of adoption where the app stops being a novelty and starts being infrastructure. Utility bill payments, peer-to-peer transfers, online shopping, salary advances for gig workers: Papara became, for a significant segment of Turkey's under-35 population, the primary interface with their own money. The over 20 million user figure, based on the company's own disclosures, represents a significant share of Turkey's young adult population.

The treasury mechanics behind those balances are worth examining in detail, because they illustrate how e-money platforms generate revenue at scale globally. Papara's reported float data, cross-referenced against publicly available deposit rate data, indicates that customer balances were placed in overnight repo agreements, short-duration government bonds, and time deposits. At average overnight rates above 40% during much of 2024, the gross yield on billions of TL in float would have been substantial. Papara's reported financial disclosures describe significant interest income on segregated funds, booked as operating revenue. This is not unusual and it is not hidden: it is the standard business model of every significant e-money institution in the world. PayPal earned approximately $480 million in interest and investment income for the full year of 2023. Revolut and Wise, the London-listed payments company, have both reported that interest income on customer balances became a significant revenue line during the high-rate environment of 2023 and 2024. What Papara built, in other words, was not a scheme but a treasury operation of the kind that regulators globally have reviewed and, broadly, accepted as consistent with consumer protection requirements.

The TMSF's appointment of a trustee to Papara in May 2025 was, in one sense, a disruption. In another, it was the system working as designed. Turkey's Savings Deposit Insurance Fund has well-established mechanisms for assuming control of financial institutions, and the transition was orderly: customer balances remained accessible, payment processing continued, and the platform's over 20 million users experienced no significant interruption of service. The fact that an institution of Papara's scale could be brought under state supervision without a bank run, without a payments freeze, and without significant consumer loss is itself a statement about the maturity of Turkey's fintech regulatory framework. The questions going forward are consequential. Whether TMSF passes float yield through to users, restructures the custodian bank arrangements, or ultimately returns the platform to private ownership will shape the next chapter of Turkish fintech. But the underlying achievement is already clear: Turkey built a digital payments platform with over 20 million users and billions of TL in balances, a platform that works, that processes real transactions for real people, and that demonstrated the depth of demand for digital financial services in a country whose traditional banking sector had been slow to meet it. The numbers are the story, and the numbers are remarkable.