South African fintech Yoco has appointed German executive Carsten Höltkemeyer as its next chief executive, handing the reins of a 200,000-merchant payments business to a European operator as the company pursues an AI-driven software expansion and contemplates its first moves beyond its home market, according to a statement shared with Launch Base Africa.
Höltkemeyer will take over as CEO on 1 June, ending a nine-month gap in which co-founders Bradley Wattrus and Lungisa Matshoba held the company as interim co-CEOs. Founding CEO Katlego Maphai stepped back in September 2025 after a decade running the business, saying the skills that launch a company are not always the same ones needed to scale it.
The appointment puts the most senior leadership of one of Africa’s best-known fintech scale-ups in the hands of a European executive — a move that is unusual for a company that has built its brand around deep local embeddedness and proximity to South Africa’s small and medium-sized businesses.
Yoco’s choice, however, follows a pattern creeping across the continent’s venture-backed startups: founders are increasingly handing operational control to professionals with experience running larger, multi-product financial institutions, as the early generation of breakout businesses enters its second decade.
A global search for scale
The search for a new CEO was global, Yoco said, and took into account candidates across Africa, the UK, Europe and the US. Höltkemeyer was the outcome. He is best known for his time as CEO of Berlin-based embedded finance group Solaris, which he joined in late 2022 and led through a difficult turnaround before leaving at the end of 2025. Before Solaris, he spent a decade running Barclaycard’s German business as market CEO, and earlier held roles at Royal Bank of Scotland and Barclays.
“Carsten has the scale, depth, and global mindset we’ve needed to accelerate what comes next,” Matshoba and Wattrus said in a joint statement.
Höltkemeyer will initially commute to South Africa from June before relocating fully in September. In a brief statement, he referenced the “scale of opportunity” and Yoco’s “clarity of purpose”, adding that independent businesses are “the backbone of South Africa’s economy”.
Once the transition is complete, the co-founder group will return to functional leadership: Wattrus as chief financial officer, Matshoba as chief product and technology officer, and Carl Wazen as chief business officer, overseeing sales and merchant operations. Maphai, the founding CEO, will remain chairman and stay involved on product and strategic questions.
A decade in, a second chapter
Yoco launched in 2015 to give small merchants access to card payments at a time when banks largely ignored them. It has since grown into South Africa’s largest independent payments and point-of-sale platform, processing 30m unique card taps a year and advancing billions of rand in working capital to merchants. In 2021, it raised an $83m Series C round led by Dragoneer Investment Group, cementing its status as a flagship African fintech.
The next phase Yoco describes is more ambitious. The company wants to build what it calls a “smart commerce platform” — an integrated layer of AI, software and financial services that gives small businesses tools not just to accept payments, but to run and grow their operations. It frames this as a shift from participation to competitive advantage, and sees its deep merchant data as a moat that no competitor can easily replicate.
“What they need has changed,” Wattrus and Matshoba said. The ambition now is to make the kind of intelligent capabilities that larger businesses take for granted affordable and accessible for the independent sector.
That vision will land in a market where bank-owned incumbents and legacy technology providers still dominate, and where a recent consolidation move underlined the realities of fintech valuations. In 2025, Nedbank acquired Yoco competitor iKhokha for R1.65bn (then roughly €80m), a deal that recalibrated price expectations in the SME payments space. Yoco had previously partnered with Nedbank on card issuance and acceptance, alongside iKhokha, HelloPay and Nightsbridge.
The founder handover trend
Maphai’s decision to step back is not an isolated leadership shuffle. In the past year, a cluster of long-serving founder CEOs at African scale-ups have handed over the top job to operational hires, reflecting an ecosystem-wide shift from building to scaling.
At Ghanaian healthtech mPharma, founder Gregory Rockson moved to board chairman earlier in 2025, handing the CEO role to former COO Kwesi Arhin. The change followed layoffs and a funding round, and pointed toward a new emphasis on operational discipline. In Egypt, food delivery platform Elmenus saw its founder Amir Allam replaced as CEO by Walid El-Saadany, a veteran who previously ran the company’s main competitor Otlob (now Talabat). That appointment was read as a move to professionalise leadership ahead of an intensifying battle with Delivery Hero’s local operation.
In each case, the narrative is similar: the creative, high-energy founder who launched the business hands the baton to someone with the experience of managing large P&Ls, governance structures and multi-market operations. Maphai himself articulated the dynamic in a LinkedIn post last year: “The skills and energy needed to start and build a company are not always the same as those required to scale it to the next level.”
The question for Yoco is whether an incoming European CEO can preserve the local commercial instincts that powered the company’s first decade while delivering the kind of process rigour and strategic coordination that a platform play demands. Yoco insists the founding team remains fully engaged, describing the co-CEO interim arrangement as a “bridge, not a destination” and stressing that the management change does not signal a strategic pivot.
“This has been a considered decision, made by all four of us,” Maphai said. “We are united in our belief that Carsten is the right person to lead Yoco forward.”
No IPO, but Africa is on the horizon
The company said it is not currently considering a public listing, pushing back against speculation that a professional CEO hire often signals IPO preparations. “Exploring a potential IPO would be a two-step process; a listing is not being considered at this time,” the company noted in a statement to Launch Base Africa.
Geographic expansion, however, is part of the medium-term outlook — though carefully couched. South Africa remains the “primary focus”, but Yoco will “selectively explore adjacent markets in Africa” if the opportunity aligns with strategic priorities and the capabilities built at home. The ambition is a multi-decade bet: digital payments penetration across the continent remains below 15%, and Yoco sees itself positioned at the very start of a long-term shift from cash to electronic transactions.
Höltkemeyer’s experience running Barclaycard Germany — a consumer and merchant credit business inside a large bank — and later restructuring a pan-European banking-as-a-service platform gives him exposure to the regulatory, partnership and operational complexity that comes with scaling financial infrastructure. Whether that track record translates to the South African SME landscape, where relationships are informal, trust is earned on the ground and competition includes both bank-owned networks and well-funded local players, will be the defining test of his tenure.
For now, Yoco’s message to the market is continuity in strategy and stability in the leadership team. The founders are not leaving; the product roadmap is unchanged; and the company is leaning more into local hiring and local shareholder focus, describing its transformation as a shift from a “global investor innovation-led model” to a “deeply local, sustainable and locally led business”. That framing sits in some tension with the appointment of a German CEO who will relocate to Johannesburg, but the company’s stake is clear: the right scaling experience was not available locally, and the best candidate — after a global search — was prepared to move.
The next few quarters will reveal how quickly an outside CEO can absorb a decade of merchant co-creation and convert it into the kind of platform economics Yoco is betting on. For Africa’s maturing tech ecosystem, the outcome will be watched as a test case for whether importing top-tier European operational talent can accelerate a local champion without diluting the founder-led energy that built it.