Yoco secures $100m credit facility for South African small-business finance

South African payments and financial-technology company Yoco has secured a US$100 million credit facility from Victory Park Capital to finance working-capital products for merchants using its platform, according to a 9 November announcement by the lender. The funding is a credit facility rather than a sale of equity in Yoco.

Yoco said the arrangement would support Yoco Capital, its automated funding service for small businesses. Victory Park Capital specialises in private credit and asset-backed finance, and the new facility is intended to expand the amount of financing available through Yoco’s existing merchant relationships.

The company says it serves about 200,000 small and independent businesses and has facilitated more than R6.5 billion of working capital for over 40,000 merchants since 2018 through previous financing partnerships. These are company-reported historical totals, not amounts being disbursed from the new facility.

Access to short-term capital can help traders and service businesses manage inventory, pay suppliers and navigate uneven cash flow. But the commercial terms, repayment periods and costs of any individual merchant advance remain essential to determining whether the product is suitable for a particular business.

The deal illustrates growing interest in financing small businesses through payments data and established commercial platforms. Its wider importance will depend on how responsibly funds are deployed, the actual cost to borrowers and repayment outcomes rather than the headline facility size alone.

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