Scale partners with Mastercard to simplify card issuance across five African markets

Scale, a South African card-issuing startup founded in 2022, has teamed up with Mastercard to make it easier for businesses to launch card payment products across five African markets: Senegal, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

The partnership addresses a longstanding challenge in African card payments, where companies typically have to navigate multiple parties — including issuing banks, payment networks, and BIN sponsors — before getting a product to market. This fragmentation slows launches and adds operational burden. Through a single-integration model, Scale and Mastercard aim to consolidate onboarding, processing, and compliance into one streamlined experience, freeing businesses to concentrate on product development rather than backend complexity.

The value proposition differs by market. In Kenya, where card adoption is already growing alongside a mature mobile money ecosystem, the partnership primarily reduces time-to-market for established fintech players. In Senegal, Ivory Coast, Zambia, and Zimbabwe — where cash and mobile wallets remain dominant — the focus shifts toward unlocking entirely new card use cases, such as companion wallet cards, SME spending tools, corporate cards, and government or NGO payout solutions.

Under the arrangement, Scale contributes the issuing infrastructure, onboarding tools, and regulatory support, while Mastercard provides its global payments network, banking relationships, and on-the-ground market knowledge.

The collaboration builds on Scale’s recent growth trajectory, which included a $700,000 fundraise in October 2024 to expand its platform across the continent. It also comes at a time of rising appetite for digital payments in Africa — McKinsey projected the continent’s financial services revenues could approach $230 billion in 2025, while modern card-issuing platforms are expected to account for roughly 35% of all payment cards issued globally by 2029.

For Scale, the Mastercard alliance offers credibility and reach across five markets simultaneously. The more pressing question, however, is whether the startup has the operational capacity to deliver on that scale — particularly in markets where mobile money is already deeply entrenched and regulatory environments vary considerably from one country to the next. The next year will be a significant test of that ambition.