Miranda Naidoo
Co-Founder & CEO at Scale
Miranda, you’ve spent more than a decade working across the African payments ecosystem, from business development and market expansion to Visa and now building your own company. Looking back, was there a particular moment when you realised you wanted to move from helping build the industry to building something yourself?
There wasn't a single lightning-bolt moment, it was more of an accumulation. I spent just under a decade at Paymentology as, essentially, the back-end plumber of transaction processing — deep in the technical guts of how cards actually work. That work took me to more than 30 African countries, and it's where I really learned the ecosystem from the ground up: the processors, the banks, the regulators, and just as importantly, the relationships and trust you need to get anything done market by market.
I thought that pairing that ground-level knowledge with the scale of one of the world's largest payment networks at Visa would be what finally shifted the needle. Although Visa taught me a lot, the fragmented ecosystem problem I'd spent a decade living inside was still there. At some point it became clear to me that I already knew exactly how to solve it — I'd just been trying to solve it for other people's companies instead of my own.
Honestly, it was also a step out in faith. I felt like God gave me the vision and the courage to take it on, and my job was just to be obedient and listen. Building Scale is the best decision I've ever made.
It’s great to hear that you had that realisation, which eventually led you to Scale. Could you share what working inside a global payments giant such as Visa taught you about Africa, and what it made you realise still needed to be built?
Working inside a global payments network taught me how much invisible infrastructure sits underneath a single "tap to pay" — the settlement rails, the risk and compliance layers, the relationships with regulators and banks in every market. What it also taught me is that the networks themselves rely on enablers to actually execute on the ground, market by market, at fintech speed.
A network's core business is the rail, not the day-to-day work of standing up a card programme in a specific country with its specific licensing and processor requirements — that's a different muscle. It’s the one that's closer to how a fintech operates than how a global network does. And that's true regardless of how transformative the technology is: large global organisations follow process, and process, by design, moves deliberately. There's real discipline in that, but it isn't built for the pace African markets actually need.
That's exactly the layer Scale was built for — we're built to execute, and execution is what Africa needs right now. Our partnership with Mastercard is the clearest validation of that thesis. Mastercard didn't need another network, they needed an enabler who could execute on the ground across African markets at the speed a fintech moves. That partnership is a bet on exactly the model I saw was missing, built by people who understand the local terrain, not retrofitted from a global template.
So, in many ways, the infrastructure is only the beginning — execution is where the complexity really begins. Since you have travelled to more than 38 countries on the continent, what is the biggest misconception international companies have when they approach Africa as a single market? What do they need to understand before trying to build or scale there?
The most common mistake is applying a single market-entry playbook — one licensing strategy, one banking partner, one compliance checklist — and assuming it scales the way it might across, say, the EU or Southeast Asia. But before any of that operational planning, companies need to understand that Africa is a relationship-driven continent. We care about our people, and people come first. Here, trust is built face to face, over time, not through a term sheet or a head office directive. If you try to shortcut that, no strategy document will save you.
That also means understanding people's cultures, their way of life, and the realities on the ground, including the informal economies that formal strategy decks tend to ignore entirely. The everyday challenges people face, how they earn, save, and move money, what they trust and why, all of it differs meaningfully from country to country, sometimes even region to region within the same country. You can't parachute in with a global assumption of how people bank and expect it to hold.
Beyond that, Africa is 54 countries, dozens of regulatory regimes, different currencies, different mobile money ecosystems, different consumer trust dynamics. What works in Kenya's M-Pesa-native environment is a completely different build than what works in Nigeria's card-and-bank-led environment, which is different again from Francophone markets under BCEAO/BEAC rules.
So, before trying to build or scale on the continent, companies need to understand that "Africa" is a shorthand for a region, not a market, and the fastest way to fail is to budget the time, capital, and relationships for one launch when you actually need a repeatable process for dozens of distinct ones. It’s not simple enough to buy market share.
Indeed, taking local culture, rules and the way business is done into account is essential to succeeding in African markets. As Scale focuses on removing much of the complexity of launching and scaling card programmes there, what are the challenges that people outside the industry rarely see? Why is solving them important for the next generation of African fintechs?
The complexity most people outside the industry never see is that "launching a card programme" isn't one project. Typically, it’s dozens of overlapping ones running in parallel: sourcing and negotiating with a processor in each market, securing the right licensing structure (or a partner who has it), integrating with local schemes and banks. The same is true for meeting each regulator's specific compliance and reporting requirements, and doing all of that again for the next country with none of it reusable by default.
For a fintech founder, that complexity is a tax on their actual product. Every month spent negotiating a BIN sponsorship or untangling a new market's KYC requirements is a month not spent building the thing customers actually want.
But it's worth being clear about why a card is worth that fight in the first place: it's transformative for the end user. A card opens up international spending, gives people access to payments they simply couldn't perform before. This has a real, daily impact on their livelihoods — how they run their businesses, pay suppliers, get paid, and participate in the wider economy. As a result, solving this infrastructure layer helps to address real problems for cardholders and for the businesses that serve them.
Speaking about fintechs, a card unlocks new lines of revenue, increases customer acquisition, and creates real stickiness — customers who hold a card with you are customers who stay. That, in turn, is what makes a business more investable, and gives fintechs the platform to scale their own growth across the region. Solving that infrastructure layer is the difference between the next generation of African fintechs being able to launch in one market and being able to scale across many.
It sounds like an incredibly complex process to manage. Stepping away from the mechanics of building and scaling in African markets for a moment, you’re also a strong advocate for women in fintech and mentor founders through programmes such as the Visa Accelerator. What have you learned from mentoring the next generation of women founders?
Mentoring has been one of the most clarifying parts of my own career, because you end up articulating things you'd never fully said out loud. The thing I wish someone had told me earlier is that you don't need to have the complete, polished version of your plan before you're allowed to ask for help or take up space in a room. I watched so many talented women hold back from raising, from pitching, from applying, because they were waiting to be "ready" in a way their male peers rarely waited for.
It's been a genuine blessing, not only to mentor, but to build a network of fellow female founders I learn from just as much in return. It's beautiful to watch how women are building — with grit, with creativity, often with far less room for error — in an environment that's still so male-dominated. We still need capital, access to opportunity, and visibility to really thrive, but we've come a long way from where we started.
The other lesson, from watching the founders I mentor build in markets I know well, is that being close to the problem (actually living the pain point you're solving) is a genuine competitive advantage. It’s not something to downplay in favour of sounding more "global" or "institutional."
That’s a very thoughtful way to look at mentorship, thank you for sharing it! Finally, now that you’re building your own company from the ground up, what would you like Scale to change about the African payments ecosystem, and what would success look like to you personally as a founder?
I want Scale to make launching and scaling a card programme in Africa a matter of weeks and one integration, instead of months and a different bespoke project in every market. If we do that well, we shift the constraint for African fintechs from “can we navigate the infrastructure” to “can we build a great product," which is the constraint that should actually determine who wins.
At our core, Scale is an African-focused business — building for Africans, by African people. That matters to me deeply, because it means the solutions we build actually reflect the realities of the people they're meant to serve. Everything we do comes back to our belief in people and payments. The two are inseparable to us.
Personally, success looks like building the next generation of payment leaders, which I already see happening through the people on our team and the founders we work alongside. It looks like solving for true financial inclusion for our people and the continent we belong to, and changing lives in the process, as the actual outcome of the infrastructure we build.
Other than that, I want to take what we've built here and prove it can work in other parts of the world too, so we can show people what Africa is capable of building.
