Some of the recent highlights of the stocks I looked at recently, included…Kaspi 🏷️ and Inter & Co Normally, if I’d hear of a largecap tech company (by the way, does that still mean > USD 10bn market cap, or do we need to inflation adjust this?) that raises the divi by 18% to offer a 9% divi yield I would expect the share price to fly. This time around with Kaspi, however, I thought… hmmmhhh this could go either way.Share price chart Kaspi, 5-days…Source: Yahoo! FinanceI thought it could go either way cuz I had just seen the share price reaction to the results of Brazilian digital bank Inter & Co.Share price chart Inter & Co., 5-days…The common denominator with both companies’ financing operations was that non-performing loans (NPL’s) have been in an upward trend… something that obviously raises investor concerns. It is also something that we’re seeing more broadly around the world atm… also in the US…Source: AllThingsVentured … and in Uzbekistan over at TBC Bank Group, for instance (see further below).Inter & Co. - Asset quality slide…Source: Inter & Co. 2026Q2 presentation Deteriorating credit quality is definitely something to monitor… and it does add to the other headache of investing in Kazakhstan; the continuous attacks on oil transports, which are rather important to the country, but… with Kaspi I had been a bit more relaxed about the credit quality issue given the Kazakh specific issue of the moratorium on bad debt disposals. Previously, Kazakh banks would just dispose of bad loans but the regulator has frozen that ability. So, the banks have to keep the bad loans on their own balance sheets. Hence, one of the reasons for the rising NPL ratio at Kaspi (and Halyk Bank).Kaspi - Credit quality slide…Source: Kaspi 2026Q2 presentation I would also imagine that borrowers feel much more inclined to repay the country’s most important e-commerce & payments operator, as opposed to a company that more heavily skews to lending activities (such as Inter). Inter seems to be deliberately taking more risk by aggressively growing Private payroll loans…Private payroll, collateralized through automatic deduction from employee paychecks under cooperation agreements with employers, has grown from R$0.2 billion to R$2.5 billion in 12 months. That is a 12-fold expansion of a new product lineSource: Sandro VergueiroStill I see a lot in Inter that I like; fast customer adoption, very efficient scaling on incremental revenues, focus on secured lending products (although…how secure are Private payroll loans, really? That product may be ripe for some regulatory intervention), solid returns on capital… and still improving, a sub 10x P/E, a progressive dividend policy, and…. a stock that has gone into the dog house……I think there could be worse times to start monitoring Inter & Co. The following write-ups helped me get up to speed…2026/05/26 - (free deep dive)2026/05/18 - (free preview)