South African fintech infrastructure company – Scale is tackling the painfully slow, expensive process of issuing payment cards.
The current reality for African fintechs is brutal. Issuing cards is technical, expensive, complex, and heavily regulated. According to data from the World Bank’s Global Findex and other regional reports, credit card penetration in sub-Saharan Africa is estimated at around 3%, while debit card usage hovers around 18%, a sign of the continent’s still-nascent card economy.
Many startups do not have the capacity or the budget to issue cards alone. Even when they try, they face risks of fraud, chargebacks, and compliance headaches that vary wildly across countries. When trying to launch a payment card product, startups typically stare at a timeline of 12 to 18 months to get off the ground. This is the problem that Scale was built to solve.
Established in 2023 by Miranda Perumal and Barbara Woollams, Scale is building an ‘issuer orchestration platform’. This backend solution removes complexity by giving startups a direct path to launching card products in multiple African markets without drowning in integration and legal delays.
What Scale does, simply
Scale is a fintech infrastructure company that helps African startups issue cards faster, cheaper, and with fewer headaches.
As an issuer orchestration platform, they handle the back-end mess of card issuing, including tech connections, compliance, payments integrations, and partner relationships, so fintech doesn’t have to go through the stressful process.
The company’s flagship product, SOIL (Scale’s Orchestration Issuing Layer), reduces the time it takes to launch a new card from 12–18 months to just 4–6 weeks. It connects everything a startup needs to launch a card product, including banks, KYC providers, processors, Visa/Mastercard rails, and more.
So, instead of fintechs spending months setting up 6–8 different partnerships, they plug into Scale’s platform.
Who’s behind Scale
Miranda Perumal, Scale’s CEO, is at the helm. She brings over a decade of experience in the payments industry, including roles at Visa, Tutuka, and Paymentology. Her co-founder, Barbara Woollams, complements that with sharp strategic and operational acumen. Together, they are building a fintech infrastructure company designed by Africans for African markets.
Funding + expansion plans
In early 2024, Scale closed a $700,000 pre-seed round. The funding was led by 54 Collective and First Circle Capital, with additional backing from Sunny Side Venture Partners and a group of angel investors.
With the funding, Scale has already expanded into Kenya, Zambia, and Côte d’Ivoire, where reliable issuing infrastructure is urgently needed.
Scale holds a valuable and strategic partnership with Mastercard, allowing fintechs using its platform to issue cards directly through the network without going through lengthy approvals or commercial negotiations. The platform is agnostic and built to respond to what the market demands, what its clients require, and what best serves African communities.
In addition, Scale’s infrastructure is already integrated with banks, processors, and KYC providers across Africa to reduce the time and cost of launch.
Their sights are set on becoming the default platform for card issuing across Africa, unlocking speed, scale, and revenue growth for startups that previously couldn’t afford to play in the space.
