Carolyn Breeze: The Payments Career Behind Scalare's CEO

By Carolyn Breeze

Carolyn Breeze's LinkedIn profile sketches the career of a payments and technology executive who now leads one of Australia's more unusual listed companies. Based in the Greater Sydney area, Carolyn is CEO of Scalare Partners, an ASX-listed (ASX: SCP) technology accelerator and investment and advisory firm. She holds a GAICD from the Australian Institute of Company Directors and a degree in Marketing from the University of Wollongong.

The through-line of Carolyn's profile is more than two decades spent across technology, telecommunications, eCommerce, payments and fintech. Her senior roles read as a tour of the sector's defining names. She served as Country Manager for Australia at Braintree, a PayPal service, and as General Manager for the ANZ region at GoCardless, where she led the UK-based company's expansion into Australia and New Zealand. Earlier work connects her to PayPal, eBay, and before that Vodafone and Telstra, with her most recent operating role before Scalare as Chief Commercial Officer at Zepto.

That payments background has earned recognition along the way. Carolyn's record includes CEO Magazine's IT and Telecommunications Executive of the Year in 2018, a place among Business Insider's top Women in Fintech, the Advocate for Women award at the 2019 Women in Payments Symposium, and Fintech Leader of the Year at the 2021 Women in Finance Awards.

Her profile also points to a portfolio of board and advisory work that sits alongside the Scalare role. Carolyn is a Non-Executive Director at Cape, a spend management platform, a Director at Startup Grind, a Non-Executive Director at Tech Ready Women Academy, and an advisory board member at PayEd. Several of these touch the parts of the ecosystem she says she cares most about. Carolyn describes her purpose as empowering organisations to drive inclusion and equality through technology and accessibility, and she champions diversity and supports female and culturally diverse and underrepresented founders.

At Scalare, Carolyn stepped into a newly created CEO role in early 2023, joining from Zepto. Under her leadership the company listed on the ASX in December 2023, which she described as the first tech accelerator to list in the country. It is a logical next chapter for an executive whose profile shows a long run of helping technology businesses find their footing in the Australian market, and who now does that work from the top of a listed accelerator.