Justin Basini, Co-Founder and CEO of ClearScore Group. (Image source: supplied)
UK based fintech firm clearscore It is looking to grow its local workforce by approximately 125 employees over the next two years, taking advantage of Cape Town’s high-skilled tech talent pool.
Justin Basini, co-founder and CEO of Clearscore Group, said this while speaking to ITWeb ahead of the inauguration 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 by opening 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.
Bassini told ITWeb that the decision to expand to a new office on Loop Street in Cape Town's central business district was driven by its local growth trajectory.
According to Clearscore, the new headquarters will serve as the group's second technology hub outside London. The office will globally support strategic engineering, product management and data The analyst works for Clearscore's international platform, as well as commercial and marketing operations in the South African market.
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“We're excited,” Basini said. “South Africa seems to have really taken ClearScore to its heart, and that's wonderful. We now partner with 25 financial institutions, so we've decided to set up a global tech hub – our second global tech hub – in our Cape Town office in South Africa.
“Up to this point, for the last 11 years, we have built our global technology in various offices in the UK, and now we will be building in the UK and South Africa for the rest of the world.”
Clearscore Group CEO Justin Basini, Wesgro CEO Renell Stander and Western Cape head Alan Winde. (Photo by Hannah St. Clair)
He said the expansion means ClearScore's current local team, which is a mix of marketing, commercial and engineering, will also expand. “The bulk of the incremental workforce, the next 100, will really be in engineering – basically software development. For example, full-stack, front-end and back-end engineers.
“We are focusing more on agentic engineering, so how we use AI to engineer software. This will increase our engineering function in Cape Town by approximately 100 heads.
“The talent pool we've got in the Western Cape, across South Africa in particular, has been fantastic. It's a great fit with Clearscore culturally. We're a passionate, mission-driven business and we've found that the talent in Cape Town is very, very good.”
Western Cape regional leadership welcomes ClearScore's investment Wesgro CEO Wrennel Stander said: “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 particularly important is that this is not just a market-expansion story, but a signal that globally relevant technology can be built from here. It speaks to the growing strength of the province's tech ecosystem, talent base and long-term investment proposition.”
Alan Winde, head of the Western Cape, said: “The appeal of the Western Cape lies not only in its skills base and digital capability, but in the wider 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. This combination makes the Western Cape increasingly competitive in attracting long-term technology investment and we welcome the development of ClearScore.”
ClearScore's global operations span the UK, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Basini said the company has 16 million users in the UK, about 2.5 million users in Australia and New Zealand, and about a million users in Canada.
In South Africa, ClearScore is gaining about a million users per year, he said, and is targeting 7.5 million users by the end of the year. The goal is to reach more than 10 million users in the next few years.
To determine a user's credit score, ClearScore pulls credit data From the credit bureau. It uses Experian in SA and Equifax According to the company, in the UK.
Bassini explained that the fintech firm was founded to educate people so they can make better financial decisions, especially when it comes to borrowing.
“We give people free access to their credit scores and reports, but at the same time, we also give them a lot of financial education. Our goal is to help people understand what credit offers they qualify for, how they can improve their credit scores.
“ClearScore wants to help users take control of their finances and learn about this game of credit, borrowing money, what money you should or shouldn't borrow, and more.”
Basini said the company is “very excited” about the AI boom and its impact, and sees it as a “massive” opportunity for Clearscore and its team.
While it doesn't use AI to determine a user's score, it is working on user-centric 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 we deal with is quite complex and so we're introducing AI to help simplify that experience. We're also introducing an AI-powered chatbot that can help people understand their credit status and what they should do.
“We are also using AI across the company to automate and improve the user experience and internal processes. Almost all of our engineers are now using a combination of cursor, cloud code Or ChatGPT. We're very open to using all those models. We use AI in our customer service operations, in our internal processes, so we're real adopters of it.
Commenting on expansion into other parts of Africa, the CEO said there are no immediate plans yet, but the fintech is “constantly” looking for opportunities.
“We're using South Africa as a way of understanding the rest of the continent where we can go next. There are some obvious places to look with larger populations in West Africa etc., where our product might be suitable for them too.”