Business Chat – Katlego Mapai CEO of YOCO

Yoco recently held its exciting YOCO Exchange day, where Business Tech Africa got to chat with their inspirational CEO Katlego Mapai, who shared some of the journey they have had, from a Fintech start-up to expanding beyond payments into loans, and now a full service as a software (SaaS) provider enabling their over 200,000 customers to easily integrate a full, plug-in and play,  point-of-sale system into their business.

Key Quotes from Katlego:

Lessons on accessibility

“One thing we cracked in our business model was the realization that we need to make getting a card machine as simple as getting a cell phone”. “So if you look at what the operators did, they really created access to folks who were previously not able to make a phone call or even access to data, and it’s just a system and a network that almost just grew itself out, and we applied that thinking to card payments”.

New Markets Opening Up to The Right Offering:

“And it’s just been amazing seeing access to the solution in places that you never used to see it before, right? The market, the barber, the spaza shop, all these places, and what’s amazing is that we provided the access and the businesses stepped into it”.

Beyond Payments into Software As  A Solution Provider

“A massive, massive focus right now is on software. So we have an incredible new suite of solutions, so a new app that helps you to manage your business, and a point of sale system, ……. where you can now really run and organize your business”.

“That’s basically the ERP for a trading business- we’re basically doing in the point of sale space what we did for payments”. “So the space is very fragmented, it’s expensive, it’s difficult to make sense of everything.

“We’ve now packaged a solution into a tablet. You can go online, order it, ship it to you, you turn it on, and you have a point of sale solution”.

Revolutionising Small and Informal Businesses with Tech

“So this is the next focus for us as a company, and it’s part of this formalization journey for small businesses, where we took them out of cash into digital, we took them out of pen and paper into using software, and now this is part of this grand formalization journey that we’re driving in the economy.