Kaizen will bring its loyalty expertise to one of Türkiye’s largest fintech gatherings, as İstanbul Fintech Week returns to Hilton İstanbul Maslak from 5–7 October 2026.
İstanbul Fintech Week 2026 will bring together banking, payments, fintech, technology and digital finance leaders under this year’s theme, “Smart, Embedded, and Tokenised.”
The programme covers five major areas of financial technology, including Sustainable Finance, Payments, AI in Finance, Digital Banking and Digital Assets, Tokenisation and Stablecoins.
Where fintech meets loyalty
Financial brands have more opportunities than ever to understand how customers use their products. A payment, a new account, a recurring transaction or the adoption of a new feature can all become part of a broader customer journey.
Kaizen helps brands turn these behaviours into opportunities for engagement and retention through loyalty programmes, rewards, personalisation and data.
This is particularly relevant as financial services become more embedded in everyday life. When payments become faster and more seamless, and banking services become increasingly digital, the experience around the product becomes an important part of how customers choose and continue to use a financial service.
“Loyalty in financial services is no longer limited to points or rewards. It is about understanding the behaviours that matter to a business and creating relevant reasons for customers to engage with the product again.” - Loran Ozshakyan, CEO & Co-Founder of Kaizen
A programme focused on where finance is heading
The İstanbul Fintech Week programme reflects the breadth of change taking place across financial services.
The Payments Summit will examine the acceleration of instant, secure and borderless transactions. The AI in Finance Summit will focus on how artificial intelligence is changing the operating model of financial services.
Digital Banking will look at open, composable and increasingly invisible banking infrastructure, while the Digital Assets Summit will explore tokenisation and stablecoins.
The programme also features a strong group of international and regional speakers.
Daron Acemoğlu, 2024 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences and MIT Institute Professor, will speak on the future of finance and AI on 6 October. Other speakers include senior representatives from the Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye, Garanti BBVA Payment Systems, BKM, Ripple, Remitly and other organisations across the financial ecosystem.
The event will also host closed-door C-Suite Roundtables covering AI in Finance, Payments, Digital Assets and Digital Banking, bringing senior decision-makers into more focused sessions around issues such as AI integration, open banking architecture and tokenised capital markets.
Kaizen at İstanbul Fintech Week
Kaizen will be exhibiting at Stand 8, on 6–7 October.
The team will showcase how loyalty can support financial brands beyond traditional reward mechanics, from increasing product adoption and transaction frequency to improving engagement and building longer-term customer relationships.
For an industry moving towards smarter, more embedded financial products, the question is no longer simply how to make a transaction easier. It is also how to give customers a reason to keep choosing the product.
That is where loyalty becomes part of the fintech conversation. Visit Kaizen at Stand 8 to explore loyalty solutions for financial services.
