Bridgecard backed by Y Combinator as the Visa/Mastercard Issuer for Africa.

Data has become affordable in most parts of Africa, for example, the price of mobile data has dropped by over 75% in Nigeria over the past 5 years. Local people have started consuming global services like Netflix, AWS, AliExpress, Udemy, etc. but don’t have a card to pay for these services. Local banks in Africa haven’t been able to support international transactions on local currency cards.

Bridgecard makes it easy for any fintech company to issue their customers a card that will carry a MasterCard or Visa logo and work anywhere in the world. We provide easy-to-integrate APIs to issue virtual and physical cards and we can get you started in 5 days or less.

Currently backed by Y Combinator in the Summer 22 batch, we are set to provide naira and dollar card issuing APIs to companies in Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, and Ghana. Our founder and CEO, Adewole Tunde, talked about the background of building this solution in this way: "My co-founder and I got into YC to build something different but after our previous card issuer kept failing us, we woke up one morning and decided to be the card issuer ourselves."

With a seamless and fast integration, companies can start profitably issuing physical or virtual cards to their users within 5 days. Also, our virtual dollar card APIs allow businesses to facilitate international payment while staying in charge of their processes through authorization, interchange rates, tokenization, and a high acceptance rate on platforms including Apple and Google pay.

Talking about the future of Bridgecard, the CTO Festus Owumi said: “The journey is a week old. We can’t wait to have as many Fintech companies as possible plug in and start to issue cards to their users.”

The problem of online card payments is one that cannot be ignored and with Bridgecard, we have created a solution that makes it easy for companies to be able to solve this for their users. If you’re building a fintech product and you need to issue cards in Africa, check out Bridgecard or send us a mail.