- When Yoko was assembling its first team to develop a new type of payments system for small businesses, it was working out of a bachelor's studio in Cape Town.
- Today, it is a R12 billion payments company with over 300,000 customers and contributing to the growth of many small South African businesses.
- And it all started with four founders, an idea and a determination to make a change that blossomed around a single table in a small office.
- This is News24's second story in our new series SA Success Stories – Inspirational original stories of successful SA businesses, NGOs and individuals, proudly sponsored by Old Mutual Wealth.
When Neo Ntsobe joined a small startup called Yoko in May 2014, he was leaving a career in banking to work in a room with a desk.
He spent 13 years at a big-four bank before joining the team building a dream in a space the size of a bachelor studio in Cape Town's Loop Street.
“I think I was employee number 10. This was the table office,” he recalls with a smile.
“The whole team, the whole company, we were sitting around this table.”
That company was Yoko – one of South Africa's fastest-growing fintech companies over the past decade, now helping more than 300,000 customers.
Today Ntsobe is the head of accounting at Yoko, but he remembers how he felt on his first day 11 years ago.
Laughing he says:
It was a cultural shock. I come from a corporate environment where there were thousands of us, and you walk into a room. It was challenging, and I even considered calling my dad and telling him I had made a mistake.
“But I knew the plan was bigger. And there was a sense of hope that this was something I wanted to be a part of, and there was an authenticity about it that attracted me to the project.”
That project was simple: simplify the payment process for small businesses by eliminating a lot of the admin involved.
Led by founders Katlego Mafai, Carl Wazen, Bradley Watrous and Lungisa Matshoba, they were inspired by tap-and-go card machines while traveling abroad.
And he believed there was a huge opportunity in Africa, where cash was still the dominant method of payment in informal and small business spaces.
Getting your DNA right in a market dominated by big banks
Eleven years after launching, the company now has a beautiful office space in Kloof Street in the Gardens where 300 people gather around many more tables, with each floor created to tell its own story over the years.
Stories and photos of their first customers – small businessmen from across South Africa – line the walls, and the famous table has followed the team everywhere, now sitting in their in-house coffee shop as a reminder of enduring patience.
The story of Yoko's famous office table.
Yoko's famous office table has followed her growing business from a small startup to her multi-storey office in The Gardens.
Gregor Rohrig has documented Yoko's journey from the beginning as a visual anthropologist. Today, he heads cultural alignment and said the office layout was very intentional about telling the company's story and staying true to its startup roots as more employees join its woven tapestry.
“From the beginning, we had to build the right team. To get the DNA right the four founders built a very strong, small, agile team, including salespeople and tech developers, people who understood the payments side.”
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This was important, Roehrig says, because they were about to enter a payments sector owned by very large institutions – and it needed people willing to go door-to-door with their first prototype, led by their first key salesman, Ronald Makomba.
“We had this little black machine, and it was initially met with a certain amount of skepticism. The really amazing thing about Ronald's door-to-door experience was that it wasn't just a sales pitch. It was showing a little part of our DNA, and it connected us to our customers.”
At the core of Yoko's rise all those years ago was that it was solving a problem for small businesses. Yoko allowed merchants to involve themselves, which was revolutionary at the time, and that conviction helped the growth of not only Yoko, but the tap-and-go payments market in South Africa.
Both Rohrig and Ntsobe embraced the idea right away and both had pivotal moments when they realized the dream had come true.
Turning Point, a blue machine and a swag store
After a successful prototyping phase, signing up 500 vendors, the business launched in 2015 and raised a funding round two years later.
Rohrig remembers growing sentiment toward the Yoko machine at that time.
Suddenly, people started talking about the little blue card machine. It became a thing, and when people started talking about a payment tool that impacted their minds, I found it strange. Have you ever come home and remembered the payment terminal at which you made a payment? There was something very empowering about that.
Yoko “blue” has always been part of the company’s logo, and very early on they decided to make their black prototypes with that blue signature – now a mainstay in many customer-facing stores around South Africa.
“Around those early days, that was the first time we were considering options. We wanted to be bold and disrupted and stay true to who we are and try blue. It was a very deliberate choice, and that blue has become a statement now.”
Yoko “blue” has always been part of its identity, even on its first beta products tested in 2014.
Yoko “blue” has always been part of its identity, even on its first beta products tested in 2014.
Yoko “blue” has always been part of its identity, even on its first beta products tested in 2014.
Growth was both steady and rapid, and the team was eventually able to move offices – first to another block in Loop Street, and then later to Shortmarket Street – each step a visual reminder of the evolution of what was once a one-table office.
“That was the first taste of what growth in an organization felt like,” says Ntsobe. “We were now a team, and had departments like marketing and sales. We even had a toilet and a kitchen,” he says, laughing.
Rohrig remembers a specific event launched a few years later on a cold winter day in Braamfontein in 2018 that cemented what Yoko had in mind.
“People were lining up to hear our founders' keynote. We had this swag store on our site and it sold out in half an hour. And I remember thinking, 'Who buys a piece of swag with the logo of a fintech payments company?' To me, it represented something else; People believed in the mission and what we stood for. It wasn't just a small device; “This was helping small businesses grow.”
A new point of product, professionalism and sales system
Today, Yoko is worth just over R12 billion. What started as a physical card machine prototype is now a full suite of digital products that help owners reduce the admin required to run their business.
But like many companies, it too faced tough times during Covid-19, which forced the company to move towards digital sales after physical sales went to zero for a period during the first lockdown.
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“We are much more agile now,” Ntsobe says. “We adapt much faster and that was accelerated in that COVID-19 period.”
Since then, and looking forward, the company now focuses more on software products for its customers, but is still manufacturing hardware, including a new physical device called Counter – a point of sale system for retail environments.
Ntsobe says, “We get a lot of feedback from our customers that they need help looking more professional. A machine like this does just that. It helps their customers know that they are professional.”
Disruptors are making a difference
Through these success story interviews, many subjects get a chance to relive their journey over many years. When Ntsobe was asked about his final thoughts and memories, he felt it was all about making a difference.
In our early days, I remember reading an article that our equipment was linked to businesses that contributed about 1% to the South African economy. For me, that was when I realized that we were really making a difference. We were showing the government what small businesses can contribute to the South African economy.
He also tells his father that he has not done any mistake.
And for Roehrig, who has seen and achieved the company's growth from a very small startup, he is proud that the ambitious disruptors of that time never shied away from doing things their own way.
“We've always done it our own way; the way we've decided on product strategy or how we go to market. I'm proud because we haven't just said yes to how the industry says we should do things. We've been allowed to do things a little bit outside the norm.”
*This is the second story in our new series from News 24 SA Success Stories – Inspirational original stories of successful SA businesses, NGOs and individuals, proudly sponsored by Old Mutual Wealth.
If you have an inspiring success story to share, email feelgood@news24.com.