Convicted Fraudster Accused of Moving $290,000 in Forfeited Crypto From Prison

Convicted Fraudster Accused of Moving $290,000 in Forfeited Crypto From Prison

Quick Reads

• Float, a Johannesburg-based fintech founded in 2021, has launched in the UK, backed by the country’s Global Entrepreneur Programme.
• The company lets shoppers split purchases on existing Visa or Mastercard credit cards into interest-free instalments of up to 24 months, without issuing new loans.
• Float has signed more than 2,200 merchants in South Africa, including Samsung, iStore and The North Face, and raised over R280 million ($17.1 million) in funding.
• Founder Alex Forsyth-Thompson says merchant sign-ups in the UK are moving faster than they did in Float’s early South African days.

When Float expands to UK shores, it’s breaking from a script most African fintechs follow. While companies like Moniepoint, Mukuru and Yellow Card have spent recent years deepening their footprint across the continent, Float has chosen Britain as its first stop outside South Africa, and its founder says that’s a deliberate bet, not an oversight.

Float’s product is a card-linked instalment tool. Rather than issuing new credit like typical buy-now-pay-later players, it lets shoppers convert purchases already made on their existing credit cards into interest- and fee-free monthly payments spread across as long as 24 months. Merchants pay the fee, not the customer, and no new loan application is involved.

Founder and CEO Alex Forsyth-Thompson told TechCabal that South Africa’s fintech sector is more competitive, relative to its market size, than people assume, and that building there prepared Float for the UK rather than holding it back. He pointed to the UK’s enormous credit card market, tens of millions of active cards and tens of billions of pounds in interest-bearing balances, as the real reason Float expands to UK rather than into neighbouring African economies first.

The company distances itself from BNPL giants like Klarna and Clearpay, arguing it serves shoppers who already have credit available and simply want more time to pay, not another loan or app to download. That positioning also shapes its regulatory footing, since Float rides on credit checks banks have already carried out rather than underwriting fresh credit itself.

Backing the UK push is the UK Government’s Global Entrepreneur Programme, which supports high-growth international firms entering Britain. Float says it has already lined up over 2,200 merchants in South Africa, including Samsung, iStore, The North Face, Cycle Lab and Tiger Wheel & Tyre, and has raised more than R280 million in funding from backers such as Standard Bank, Invenfin, Platform Investment Partners and Saad Investment Holdings.

Getting the tech ready for the UK wasn’t a copy-paste job. Forsyth-Thompson said the platform needed a rebuild to handle multiple territories and payment environments before Float could expands to UK operations at all, infrastructure work that, now complete, should make future market entries quicker.

The bigger story, according to Forsyth-Thompson, is that South Africa’s tough, crowded fintech environment forced Float to become lean and efficient long before it ever considered a market as mature as Britain’s, turning a constrained home market into an unlikely competitive edge.