Yoco Technologies has secured a $100mn credit facility from Victory Park Capital Advisors, as the South African payments and software company backed by TPG expands financing for its network of small-business merchants.
The Cape Town-based group, which provides card terminals and commerce software to more than 200,000 merchants, will use the money to provide finance and cash advances to its customers, chief executive Carsten Höltkemeyer said in a statement. Terms of the facility, including pricing and maturity, were not disclosed. The transaction is a private credit deal — debt arranged directly by a non-bank investment firm rather than raised through public bond markets or syndicated bank loans — from a manager that specialises in asset-backed lending.
Yoco was founded in 2015 and has raised more than $170mn from investors including TPG, Dragoneer Investment Group and Partech. TPG, the Nasdaq-listed private equity group, is among its most prominent backers, a factor that has helped Yoco raise its profile with international creditors as it moves beyond payments into lending and software. The new facility is debt rather than equity and does not change Yoco’s shareholder register.
The company’s merchant finance product, Yoco Capital, was launched in 2018. It offers eligible merchants a cash advance that is repaid automatically through a percentage of their card sales, rather than through a fixed monthly schedule. Yoco says the product is not a conventional loan: there is no interest rate, no collateral requirement and no late-penalty regime; instead, the company charges a flat fee and adjusts repayments to the merchant’s sales. Eligibility is based on a business’s Yoco transaction history, and merchants must have been on the platform for at least six months.
Yoco says it has disbursed more than R3bn, or about $160mn, through Yoco Capital. The $100mn facility is therefore large relative to the historical size of the programme and gives Yoco additional capacity to meet demand without relying solely on its own balance sheet. Yoco is not a licensed deposit-taking bank; it provides credit through the merchant cash-advance mechanism, funded by its balance sheet or by credit partners.
The deal comes as South African policymakers and development institutions focus on the country’s persistent small-business credit gap. Micro, small and medium-sized enterprises generate about 34 per cent of GDP and 60 per cent of jobs, according to the International Finance Corporation, but only about 5 per cent of formalised MSMEs have access to credit. The OECD estimates the MSME financing gap at ZAR350bn. Part of the problem is structural: the National Credit Act treats many businesses with turnover below R1mn as consumers, while thin credit records and a lack of collateral make traditional banks reluctant to lend. Fintech lenders argue that alternative data — such as card-sales histories — can help them underwrite businesses that banks cannot easily assess.
Victory Park Capital, founded in 2007 and headquartered in Chicago, specialises in private asset-backed credit. It became a majority-owned affiliate of Janus Henderson in 2024. The firm reported $3.57bn in discretionary regulatory assets in a July 2026 Form ADV filing, its fund documents cite about $5.6bn in assets under management as of October 2025. It has invested more than $11bn across 235 investments since inception, according to a fund prospectus.
Victory Park has also been expanding in emerging-market fintech lending. The IFC committed $50mn to a Victory Park fund in 2025, and IDB Invest has backed the same strategy, which provides debt financing to fintech lenders targeting MSMEs. That strategy has focused particularly on Mexico and Colombia, according to the IFC, so the Yoco transaction extends Victory Park’s emerging-market fintech exposure into South Africa. The firm has continued to deploy capital in asset-backed facilities elsewhere, including a $100mn credit facility to US construction lender Billd this month.
For Yoco, the facility provides funding to deepen its relationship with merchants beyond payments at a time when competition among South African SME lenders is intensifying. For Victory Park, it adds a South African payments-and-lending platform to a portfolio built around short-duration, asset-backed credit — an asset class that has attracted growing interest from institutional investors seeking yields higher than those available in conventional corporate debt.
The deal also illustrates how global private credit managers are increasingly willing to finance the loan books of fintech platforms in emerging markets. Such lending can offer diversification from developed-market corporate credit, but it also carries risks tied to the credit performance of small businesses, currency movements and the regulatory treatment of fintech lenders in markets such as South Africa.