The company was founded in South Africa in 2021 and now powers instalment offerings across more than 2,200 stores, including Samsung, Diesel, Reebok, The North Face, Trek Bikes and official Apple resellers. It launched in the UK in 2026, its first market outside South Africa.

In this Behind the Idea, Alex Forsyth-Thompson, founder and CEO of Float, discusses the gap between credit that is available and credit that is flexible, the first thirty seconds of a merchant conversation, and what it took to move the model into a second market.

Float is merchant-enablement technology for instalment payments. We give merchants the ability to let their shoppers split a purchase into interest-free monthly instalments, using the credit the shopper already has on their existing credit card, rather than issuing them a new line of credit at checkout. It’s the merchant’s own instalment offering, powered by Float.

For shoppers, that means the ability to split a purchase without opening a new account, taking on new debt, or downloading another app, while keeping every protection and benefit their existing card already gives them. For merchants, it means being able to offer real payment flexibility on larger purchases without carrying any of the credit risk themselves.

We work with major retail brands across categories like electronics, sports and homeware, plugging merchants into tens of millions of existing credit cards and hundreds of billions in existing, largely unused credit. We launched in South Africa, and as of mid-2026, in the UK, our first market outside home.

Source link