Payments company Yoko this month announced major updates to its business that go far beyond electronic card payments for independent businesses.
The company started as an electronic payments company for businesses that were losing revenue due to expensive card payment devices, strict contracts, and slow approval processes.
Founded in 2015, Yoco has come a long way since its humble roots. In 2017, it had 10,000 merchants and processed 4.4 million transactions. The company currently works with more than 200,000 merchants and processed 359 million transactions from 30 million consumers last year.
In June, the company made its next big move, releasing more than 20 new features including an AI assistant, loyalty rewards, industry-specific tools, lower fees, and backend assistants to help you run your business.
These tools do more than just process payments. These are designed to give customers what Yoco calls an “unfair advantage” in the market.
These are the kinds of tools that can make the difference between business success and failure.
Yoco was founded in 2015 to solve a distinct problem: many small businesses struggle to reliably accept card payments. Eleven years later, the company says its goals have broadened in scope.
Independent businesses, which make up around 40% of South Africa’s economy, often operate using tools designed for larger companies and then scale back. Yoco aims to build tools specifically shaped to fit your needs.
Carl Wazen, Yoco’s chief business officer, said the update provides small businesses with features that were previously available primarily to larger companies.
“Yoco started by giving independent businesses access to payments. Now we’re giving them tools that previously belonged only to large companies, at a price point built for small and medium-sized businesses.”
Let’s take the restaurant business as an example. Owners typically rely on monthly financial reports and intuition to understand how their business is doing. Peak hours are chaotic, staff sometimes give untracked discounts, and owners rarely know how well they’re doing until the end of the month.
Now you can track it in real time. Yoco’s recent acquisition, Dyner.ai, gives a little indication of how much profit is seeping into the restaurant floor.
At a Yoco media briefing in June, Diner co-founder and certified accountant Tarentha Ngobeni explained the realities of running a modern restaurant business.
“There are thousands of moving parts involved in a restaurant, from inventory to suppliers to staff to peak pressures to the customer experience. We studied this business intensively to understand what the problems are and came up with a solution that gives us real-time visibility into everything happening inside our restaurants.”
Yoco AI monitors sales patterns over the day and week. Sales of chicken curry increase by 40% on Thursdays, but the kitchen is often gone by 8pm. The system alerts the owner, “Based on this week’s trends, please increase Thursday’s curry by 12 servings.”
The result is less lost sales and less waste (restaurants typically waste 4-8% of their revenue), which translates to your bottom line.
The waiter enters the order into the terminal. The terminal goes directly to the kitchen, so there’s less room for mistakes with orders. Checkout times are 2x faster with invoices issued at the touch of a button. The table is now empty for the next customer.
When we started Yoco, we didn’t set out to be all things to all businesses. It focused on the specific needs of independent retailers, such as spaza shops, restaurants, salons, retail stores and hospitality businesses, which make up around 40% of SA’s economy.
These businesses have low profit margins, deal with fluctuating cash flows, and often lack the time and resources to use complex enterprise tools. By designing products based on everyday reality, rather than scaling down enterprise software, Yoco built relevance and continuity.
New features
Yoco announced a series of new features designed to accelerate business success.
Horizontal AI: an AI assistant that leverages sellers’ own sales, cost, and staffing data, developed after the company acquired Dyner.ai. Merchants can ask questions in plain language and receive answers and actions, such as adding new products to the catalog or flagging unusual spending patterns. The system learns from the business over time and suggests next steps without the owner having to initiate every query.
Yoko’s loyalty: Give your customers automatic rewards on every card payment without the need for a separate app or punch card. Once the customer pays, the system recognizes the card, accumulates points, and sends a confirmation via WhatsApp. This is aimed at boosting repeat business, with a focus on food and beverage retailers, where data shows one in three customers return at least twice a month.
Industry mode: Tailor your POS system to your specific field. For food and beverage, there are separate modes for counter and table service, including tableside ordering and real-time table management. Retail mode includes barcode scanning, real-time inventory updates, and multi-location monitoring. Beauty and service mode supports booking appointments, tracking stylists, and calculating commissions.
Horizontal savings: Sellers can set up multiple pockets within their account for specific purposes such as VAT or equipment exchange. With the ability to automatically allocate a percentage of your daily earnings, no lock-in period, and instant access, you can earn attractive returns over the course of a year.
Horizontal Connect: Consolidate your accounting, e-commerce, inventory, and other tools in one place. The company reports that over 500 merchants are already using the Xero integration exclusively. A developer hub and API tools enable third parties to build on the platform, with over 50 applications currently in active use.
All this comes in addition to significant reductions in fees, which will put more than R250 million back into merchants’ pockets annually.
harsh reality
These are the harsh realities of running an independent business in SA. 51% report that their customers will spend less in 2026, and 46% feel less confident about their business.
“We’re building more than a card machine,” said Brad Wattrus, co-founder and CFO of Yoco.
“We take businesses from surviving to thriving. We remove the back-end complexity and enable entrepreneurs to enjoy what they do.”
Yoko says creative use of AI and sector-specific management tools has made entrepreneurship rewarding again.
brought to you by Horizontal.
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