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YOCO

PASSION, TALENT AND A SHARED SENSE OF PURPOSE SEE YOCO GROW INTO A LEADING AFRICAN TECHNOLOGY COMPANY IN A FEW SHORT YEARS

INNOVATIONS

OF THE WORLD

FOR TODAY'S BIG THINKERS
INNOVATE South Africa

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INNOVATE™ South Africa

INNOVATE South Africa

As Featured In:

INNOVATE™ South Africa

In a few short years since launching in 2015, Yoco has grown into an African technology company that is ready to take on the world. With its focus on creating opportunities for small businesses, breaking down the barriers they face, and helping them to participate fully in a more inclusive and small-business supportive economy, Yoco is making waves in South Africa and beyond.

Yoco is a very significant player in Africa’s financial services landscape. While the focus of this payments software and business funding specialist remains firmly on enabling SMMEs in Africa to receive cashless payments and access the finance they need to sustain and grow their operations, Yoco itself is anything but a small business.

Today, Yoco is the preferred digital payments enabler for more than 200 000 small and micro-merchants in South Africa. Yoco point of sale devices and online merchant enablement portal process an average of more than US$1.8 billion in card payments every year. And the numbers of merchants and value of payments processed are increasing exponentially every month.

To support this growth trajectory, the company employs over 300 people globally, half of whom are in tech. The company already has plans well underway to increase that staff complement to more than 400 by the end of 2022, with over 60% of those hires in technology, product, design and data. It’s an ambitious goal, but one that Lungisa Matshoba, CTO at Yoco, says is very achievable, given Yoco’s compelling employee value proposition, as evidenced by its recent as one of Fast Company’s Best Workplaces for Innovators 2021.

For Yoco to achieve its ambitious headcount goals, a creative move was made by acquiring Dado, a software development company. “They follow our values and believe in our mission. When we find these companies, we want them to join us in our journey because we value their talent and purpose-driven approach to solving customer problems, and we decide to acquire vs hire,” says Matshoba. Dado, is the second software development company acquired by Yoco. More can be expected in the future.

Yoco’s talented executive leadership team also recently received a number of shots in the arm. Mariam Minhas Mannan was appointed as the organisation’s Chief People Officer. Mannan previously worked at Amazon.com as the Regional HR Director for the Middle East & North Africa regions – experience that will prove invaluable in driving the company’s talent growth objectives over the coming year. The organisation has made other key appointments from organisations such as Nike, Uber, Airbnb, Luno, Mckinsey & Company, Naspers and Investec to name but a few.

He points out that recruiting top talent from around the world is absolutely imperative given the company’s strategy to take its business building products and services further into Africa, and beyond. “Yoco’s goal is to sign up at least a million merchants within the next four years,” Matshoba explains, “which can only be achieved if we have the superior talent and resources in place to incrementally grow our South African presence, while at the same time realising our objective of delivering our solutions to other countries in Africa and the Middle East.”

“We’re confident that the hard work we have put in to establish Yoco as a strong global financial services provider with very solid technology and talent foundations has positioned us well to quickly achieve, and exceed, our vision,” Matshoba says, “which we fully intend doing by delivering the innovative solutions needed by the well over 100 million small businesses that are active across Africa and the Middle East.”

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