South African payments company Yoco has secured a $100 million credit facility from United States investment firm Victory Park Capital to expand its cash advances for small businesses, the company announced on Monday 9 November 2026.

The facility will fund Yoco Capital, the company's embedded finance arm, which provides working capital advances to merchants using Yoco's card machines and online payment tools. It is Yoco's first direct move into the debt market, and the company says it will give it direct control over the financing it offers merchants, rather than relying on specialist credit providers as it has done until now.

Yoco describes the facility as one of Africa's largest dedicated merchant cash advance facilities. The terms, including its length and pricing, have not been disclosed.

How the advances work

Yoco Capital offers advances of between R2,000 and R1.5 million to merchants already trading on the platform. Eligible offers appear in the Yoco app after a business is assessed using live sales data from its in-person and online payments, rather than through a traditional loan application. No collateral is required, and repayments are deducted automatically from a merchant's daily card takings, so the amount repaid moves with sales.

Merchants typically use the money to buy stock ahead of busy periods, hire staff, upgrade equipment or open new branches, according to the company. Yoco says its Capital service has advanced more than R6.5 billion, about $395 million, to more than 40,000 merchants since it began in 2018, and it plans to extend the service to more of the 200,000-plus businesses on its platform across retail, hospitality and services.

What the companies said

Carsten Holtkemeyer, Yoco's chief executive, said the facility would give the company control of the financing layer of its business for the first time. "We have spent a decade building an operating system that runs a merchant's whole business, payments, point of sale, and now the decisions in between. Financing was the one layer we didn't fully control. This facility changes that," he said in a statement on Monday.

Jason Brown, a senior partner at Victory Park Capital, said the Chicago-based firm supported Yoco's mission to expand access to flexible financing for South African entrepreneurs. Victory Park, which specialises in private credit and asset-backed finance, says it has invested more than $12 billion across 260 investments since 2007 and manages about $3.6 billion in assets.

A large gap in small business finance

Access to finance remains a constraint for smaller businesses in South Africa. A 2025 report by Finfind and African Bank put the country's small business financing gap at about R350 billion, and estimated that small and medium-sized enterprises receive 13 percent of national bank lending, compared with 51 percent for large corporations.

Yoco's bet is that the transaction data generated by merchants using its card machines can help it assess businesses that traditional lenders struggle to evaluate. The company says it has not recorded an unprofitable lending cohort since it began advancing capital in 2018, including during the Covid-19 pandemic, although it has not published cohort-level figures, default rates or write-offs.

The test for the new facility will be whether Yoco can scale its cash advances without losing the discipline behind that record. For the merchants, the measure will be simpler: whether funding arrives when they need it, helping them keep the doors open and the tills ringing.