UK-based fintech firm ClearScore is looking to grow its local workforce to around 125 employees over the next two years, tapping into Cape Town’s highly-skilled tech talent pool.
So says Justin Basini, co-founder and CEO of the ClearScore Group, speaking to ITWeb ahead of the opening of the company’s new headquarters in the Mother City yesterday.
ClearScore, which launched in the UK in 2015, made South Africa its first international market when it opened its first Cape Town office in 2017. Since then, it has grown in the local market and now counts 6.6 million South Africans as part of its 26 million global user-base.
Its local growth trajectory led to the decision to expand to a new office on Loop Street in Cape Town’s central business district, Basini told ITWeb.
According to ClearScore, the new headquarters will serve as the group’s second tech hub outside London. The office will support globally-strategic engineering, product management and data analyst functions for ClearScore’s international platform, alongside commercial and marketing operations serving the South African market.
“We’re excited,” said Basini. “South Africa really seems to have taken ClearScore to its heart, and that’s wonderful. We now partner with 25 financial institutions, so we’ve decided to put a global tech hub – our second global tech hub – in South Africa in our Cape Town office.
“Up until this point, for the last 11 years, we’ve built our global technology out of various offices in the UK, and now we will build in the UK and in South Africa for the rest of the world.”
The expansion, he explained, means ClearScore’s current local team, which is a mix of marketing, commercial and engineering, will also expand. “The incremental headcount, the next 100, will be really in engineering – software development basically. For example, full-stack, front-end and back-end engineers.
“We’re looking more at agentic engineering, so how we use AI to engineer software. It’ll be an increase of about 100 heads in our engineering function in Cape Town.
“The talent pool we found in the Western Cape, across the whole of South Africa, but especially Western Cape, has just been fantastic. It’s very culturally aligned with the way ClearScore is. We’re a passionate, mission-driven business and we find the talent is very, very good in Cape Town.”
The Western Cape’s regional leadership have welcomed ClearScore’s investment, with Wesgro CEO Wrenelle Stander stating: “ClearScore’s decision to deepen its presence in Cape Town is a strong endorsement of the Western Cape as a destination for innovation-led investment.
“What makes this especially significant is that it is not simply a market-expansion story, but a signal that globally-relevant technology can be built from here. That speaks to the growing strength of the province’s tech ecosystem, talent base and long-term investment proposition.”
Western Cape premier Alan Winde added: “The Western Cape’s appeal lies not only in its skills base and digital capability, but in the broader environment it offers businesses and talent.
“Companies need places where they can grow with confidence, and people want places where they can build careers and quality lives. That combination is increasingly what makes the Western Cape competitive in attracting long-term technology investment and we welcome ClearScore’s growth.”
Growth focus
ClearScore’s global operations span the UK, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The company has 16 million users in the UK, about 2.5 million users in Australia and New Zealand, and close to a million users in Canada, noted Basini.
In South Africa, he said, ClearScore is acquiring about a million users a year, and is targeting 7.5 million users by year-end. The target is to get it up to more than 10 million users over the next couple of years.
To determine a user's credit score, ClearScore pulls credit data from the credit bureaus. It uses Experian in SA and Equifax in the UK, according to the company.
Basini explained that the fintech firm was founded to educate people, so they can make better financial decisions, especially in terms of borrowing.
“We give people free access to their credit score and report, but also, we give them lots of financial education. We aim to help people understand what offers of credit they qualify for, how they can improve their credit score.
“ClearScore wants to help users take control of their finances and learn about this game of credit, borrowing money, what money should you borrow or should you not borrow, etc.”
Basini stated the company is “very excited” about the AI boom and its influence, and views it as a “massive” opportunity for ClearScore and its team.
While it does not use AI to determine a user’s score, it’s working on user-focused AI features for its app to be launched in 2026.
“We’re putting AI into our product, as you would expect, A lot of the information that we deal with is quite complex and so we’re introducing AI to help simplify that experience. We’re also introducing an AI-driven chatbot, which can interactively help people understand their credit situation and what they should be doing.
“We’re also using AI across the company to automate and improve user experience and internal processes. Almost all our engineers are now using a combination of Cursor, Claude Code or ChatGPT. We’re very open to using all those models. We use AI within our customer service operation, within our internal processes, so we’re real adopters of it.”
Commenting on expansion to other parts of Africa, the CEO said there are no immediate plans yet, but the fintech is “constantly” looking at opportunities.
“We’re using South Africa as a way of understanding the rest of the continent where we might go next. There are obvious places to look at some of the big populations in West Africa, etc, where our product might be suitable for them as well.”
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