Card issuance in Africa has always been a coordination problem. To issue a Visa or Mastercard-branded payment card, a fintech must assemble a stack of relationships — an issuing bank, a BIN sponsor, a payment network, and a processor — before it can issue a single card. Scale, a South African fintech founded in 2022, was built to collapse that stack into one integration. A new commercial partnership with Mastercard across five markets is the first real test of whether that infrastructure thesis holds at scale.
The partnership, announced on March 26, gives fintechs and non-financial institutions in Senegal, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Zambia, and Zimbabwe access to a unified card issuance platform combining Scale’s issuing infrastructure with Mastercard’s global payment network and established banking relationships. Instead of negotiating separately with multiple counterparties, businesses integrate once with Scale and get compliant card issuance across all five markets from a single onboarding journey.
“Across Africa, innovators are creating powerful solutions, yet many are slowed down by the complex steps required to issue cards,” said Miranda Naidoo, Scale’s Co-Founder and Chief Executive. “The partnership enables businesses to focus on what they do best.” Mastercard’s Mete Guney, Executive Vice President for Market Development in the region, described the deal as “an important progression from our 2024 announcement to tangible market enablement.”
That framing — progression, not launch — is important context. This is not Scale’s entry into a partnership with Mastercard. The two companies announced a preliminary collaboration in 2024. The March 2026 announcement is commercialisation: live markets, integrated compliance systems, and a defined product. The pipeline has become a platform.
Why these five markets
The five-market selection is not arbitrary, and it is not uniform. Senegal, Ivory Coast, Zambia, and Zimbabwe share a structural characteristic: card penetration is low, mobile money or cash dominates everyday transactions, and card issuance today is largely restricted to bank customers or corporate expense programmes. The opportunity Scale and Mastercard are targeting is the layer of fintechs and non-bank entities — payroll processors, government disbursement programmes, NGOs distributing aid, e-commerce platforms — that need to issue cards but lack the regulatory and banking relationships to do so directly.
Kenya is a different story. Mobile money is already dominant: Safaricom’s M-PESA holds 89.7% of Kenya’s mobile money market. Card usage is growing in Kenya not as a replacement for mobile money but as a complement — for e-commerce transactions, cross-border travel spending, and higher-value purchases where card rails are preferred or required. What Scale reduces in Kenya is time-to-market for fintechs already operating in the market who want to add a card product without renegotiating their bank relationships from scratch.
The market split also reflects Mastercard’s existing network footprint. Ivory Coast and Senegal are Francophone West Africa’s two largest economies by financial services penetration. Zambia and Zimbabwe are underserved Southern African markets where Mastercard’s issuing bank relationships are thin enough that a BIN-sponsor intermediary like Scale provides genuine distribution value rather than merely convenience.
Commercial arrangement, not certification
The nature of the agreement matters commercially. This is a commercial partnership, not a certification or a network membership. Scale is not simply becoming a certified Mastercard issuer in these markets. The arrangement is a go-to-market collaboration in which Scale’s issuing technology platform and Mastercard’s payment network infrastructure are bundled into a single offering for fintechs. Scale provides customer onboarding, card programme management, compliance systems, and regulatory support. Mastercard provides network access, inter-bank settlement infrastructure, and the card scheme’s brand and acceptance network.
The announcement does not describe exclusivity, and nothing in the public terms suggests Scale is locked out of building Visa-programme equivalents in the same markets. What Scale has secured is a credible, named anchor partner in Mastercard — a signal that dramatically reduces the enterprise sales cycle when approaching fintech clients. For a company that raised $700,000 in pre-seed funding in October 2024, that commercial validation is the asset.
Scale did not announce a new fundraise alongside the partnership. Asked whether the company is currently raising, Scale had not responded to a request for comment by time of publication. The pre-seed round, led to expand the platform across Africa, was the company’s only publicly disclosed external funding. The Mastercard partnership is likely a precondition for a Series A process rather than a concurrent one: the commercial validation an institutional investor would require before writing a cheque into an early-stage infrastructure play.
Competitive position
Scale is not entering an empty market. African card issuance infrastructure has several established players, each approaching the problem from a different angle.
Cellulant, the pan-African payments company operating in 19 markets, built its card stack as one component of a broader payment aggregation business. Its model is horizontal — serving merchants across multiple payment types — rather than a pure-play issuance infrastructure layer. Interswitch, Nigeria’s dominant card infrastructure company and operator of the Verve network, is the closest structural comparator: Interswitch manages BIN sponsorship, processing, and programme management, but its primary customer base is Nigerian banks and large enterprises. Its cross-border footprint in Francophone West Africa is limited.
Paystack, acquired by Stripe in 2020 for approximately $200 million, added card issuance to its product suite but positions it primarily as a virtual card feature for Nigerian businesses managing online and international payments. It is not a white-label infrastructure product in the way Scale is positioning itself.
Scale’s differentiation, if it holds, is the single-integration model across multiple markets combined with compliance infrastructure that eliminates the regulatory fragmentation that has historically slowed card programmes in smaller African markets. Whether that is sufficient moat against a well-capitalised competitor entering the same vertical is untested. The company has a two-year track record and a $700,000 balance sheet. The Mastercard partnership extends its credibility significantly beyond what that balance sheet alone would justify.
The infrastructure layer question
The deeper question for Scale is whether card issuance infrastructure in Africa is a standalone business or a feature of a larger payments stack. Globally, modern card-issuing platforms — Marqeta, Galileo, Railsr — have shown that the infrastructure layer can generate durable revenue at scale, but each of those companies raised hundreds of millions of dollars to build out their compliance, processing, and bank partnership infrastructure before reaching profitability.
Africa’s card economy is growing. McKinsey projects the continent’s financial services revenues could reach approximately $230 billion in 2025, with card-based transactions accounting for a rising share as smartphone penetration increases and e-commerce matures. The demand for card issuance infrastructure is real and growing. The question is which company, at what capitalisation level, captures it.
Scale has chosen its five opening markets deliberately. The next data point is whether client wins in those markets follow the partnership announcement — and whether a funding round follows the client wins.
