Yoco Secures $100 Million Credit Facility From Victory Park Capital to Scale SME Lending
South African fintech Yoco has secured a $100 million private credit facility from Victory Park Capital Advisors to fund merchant cash advances, targeting what the company describes as a ZAR 350 billion SME credit gap. The deal signals growing international private capital appetite for African SME lending at meaningful scale.
Yoco Capital: the data is the loan
Every bank in South Africa can see a small business's credit score. Only Yoco can see whether its card sales jumped 40% in December and crashed in January.
That real-time sales picture is what this $100 million facility is actually buying. Yoco's bet — disbursing R6.5 billion to 40,000 merchants already — is that transaction history is a better measure of a small business's ability to repay than anything a bank statement shows.
If that holds at scale, the facility doesn't just close a funding gap. It proves that the payments relationship is the underwriting relationship — and that the most valuable thing a fintech can own isn't the terminal, it's the data coming through it.
3 sources
- Yoco taps $100 million credit facility to scale merchant cash advances · techcabal.com · T1
- South African fintech Yoco secures $100 million credit facility from Victory Park Capital Advisors · innovation-village.com · T2
- SA Fintech Yoco Snags $100m Private Credit Facility to Scale SME Lending · launchbaseafrica.com · T1