Mastercard has announced two separate expansions of its African digital payments footprint, launching a virtual card product in Sierra Leone and extending a card infrastructure partnership with South African fintech Scale across five African markets.
In Sierra Leone, Mastercard has partnered with Orange and Zenith Bank Sierra Leone to launch the Orange Money Mastercard, a virtual card linked directly to Orange Money mobile wallets. The product enables customers to make online payments, access international digital services and conduct cross-border transactions through their mobile accounts without requiring a traditional bank relationship. The launch targets both individual consumers and small businesses, addressing Sierra Leone’s historically low banking penetration by anchoring digital payment access to the country’s existing mobile money infrastructure.
The Scale partnership addresses a structural barrier that has slowed card-based payment adoption across sub-Saharan Africa. Organisations seeking to offer card programmes have typically been required to coordinate separately with payment networks, Bank Identification Number sponsors and issuing banks, a multi-party process that adds cost and delays market entry. Under the expanded arrangement, Mastercard and Scale offer a single integration point covering onboarding, processing, BIN sponsorship, operations and regulatory compliance, reducing the technical and operational burden for fintechs and financial institutions seeking to issue cards at scale.
Both developments sit within a broader acceleration of Mastercard’s African presence. The company expanded its continental acceptance network by 45 per cent in 2025, opened new offices in Ghana, Uganda and Mauritius over the past two years, and grew its Africa workforce by nearly 20 per cent. Africa’s digital payments market is projected to reach USD 1.5 trillion by 2030, a figure that has drawn sustained investment from global networks, regional banks and homegrown fintech platforms competing to build the underlying infrastructure.
Editor’s Note: The Sierra Leone launch is notable for its mobile-money-first architecture, reflecting a broader trend across West Africa where virtual cards linked to mobile wallets are extending digital commerce access faster than traditional card issuance can. The Scale partnership’s single-integration model is worth tracking as a template that could significantly compress the timeline for fintech card programme launches across the continent.
