A bank statement is a photograph. A stream of card transactions is closer to a video.
Yoco, the South African payments company, has secured a $100M credit facility from US investment firm Victory Park Capital to expand Yoco Capital, its merchant cash advance business, and take control of a financing layer it previously left to specialists.
Lending against live sales
Yoco has advanced more than R6.5B ($395M) to over 40,000 merchants since 2018, working through third-party credit providers. The new facility lets it set pricing and carry the risk itself.
Advances run from R2,000 ($122) to R1.5M ($91,185), require no collateral, and appear in the app as an offer once live sales data has been assessed rather than after an application. Repayment is deducted from daily takings, so the schedule moves with revenue – helpful in a slow month, but a model that raises questions when trade turns unpredictable.
Chief executive Carsten Holtkemeyer says the facility closes the one layer of the merchant’s operating stack Yoco did not fully control. The company serves more than 200,000 businesses.
The data edge, unproven at scale
Yoco says it has never recorded an unprofitable lending cohort since 2018, including through the pandemic. It did not publish cohort performance, default rates or write-offs with the announcement.
The opportunity is real. A 2025 Finfind and African Bank report puts South Africa’s small-business financing gap at roughly R350B ($21.3B), with SMEs taking 13% of national bank lending against 51% for large corporates.
Victory Park, which has invested more than $12B across 260 deals since 2007, is effectively underwriting Yoco’s claim that transaction data explains a business better than a credit bureau does. The test is whether that discipline survives the scale the facility is meant to buy.
