Yoyo was founded in August 2007, born from Bevan’s idea to enable people to pay with their phones and leave their wallets at home.
At the time, this was not an obvious idea. Smartphones didn’t exist as we know them today, and paying with a mobile device was largely unheard of.
To solve this, Bevan imagined a way for customers to securely store their bank card in a mobile app and use it to pay in-store. Behind the scenes, the payment would be processed through an online gateway, just like an e-commerce transaction, before being passed back to the point-of-sale system to close the bill – an approach that had never been done before.
This early venture was initially named wiWallet, and later evolved into wiGroup.
Taking the Leap
In August 2007, aged just 23, Bevan left his corporate job with no capital and no safety net. He set out to build the foundations of the business while raising the funding needed to bring the idea to life.
He invited his close university friend, Basie Kok, to join as the CTO. Basie, who was still studying at the time, started developing early prototypes part-time while Bevan continued working to secure investment.
By December 2007, after countless unsuccessful investment pitches, Bevan finally secured a meeting with John Bright, CEO of UCS Group. That meeting changed everything. UCS agreed to back Bevan and the idea with a R4.4 million investment, bringing not only capital but strategic value. Through its ownership of a large network of point-of-sale companies, UCS provided access to the critical integration layer needed to make the concept work.
Building From the Ground Up
With funding secured, the business began to take shape from Bevan’s flat. The early team quickly expanded to six people, including Mia Sevenster, Pete Miller, Rodney Spencer and Eugene Smal.
With limited resources but strong belief in the vision, the team focused on building a product that was far ahead of its time.
On 08-08-08 wiWallet went live, with the team buying a coffee using their phones in Cafe Neo around the corner from the home office. This became the first mobile payment of this type – years before in-store mobile payments became mainstream.
While the product worked, the broader ecosystem was not ready.
Retailers were hesitant to adopt new payment methods without customer traction, customers had little reason to change behaviour without a network of retailers live, and banks were not yet supportive of “card not present” transactions for in person payments. The team were faced with a classic chicken and egg problem alongside macro headwinds of being too early.
Like many pioneering technologies, wiWallet faced a fundamental challenge:
Adoption required scale, but scale required adoption.
The Pivot
Despite its early innovation, it became clear that the original consumer-app model would not scale. Rather than step away, the business evolved.
wiWallet became wiGroup. The company shifted from building a single consumer payment app to building the infrastructure retailers needed to support a new generation of digital transaction types. At the heart of this shift was wiCode: a platform that allowed retailers to integrate once and enable any app to transact in-store — whether for digital wallets, vouchers, gift cards, loyalty or rewards.
It solved a growing retailer problem. As demand emerged for closed-loop digital transaction types such as vouchers, gift cards, rewards and loyalty, retailers could not keep updating their point-of-sale systems for each new entrant. They needed a universal transaction layer.
Visa and Mastercard had created the rails for card payments – open-loop transactions. But no one had created the equivalent rails for closed-loop voucher, gift card and loyalty value. wiGroup stepped into that gap.
The pivot changed the company’s trajectory: from B2C to B2B, from product to platform, and from consumer payments to the infrastructure layer for closed-loop digital value. It became the foundation for long-term growth.
Scaling, Capital and Pressure
As the business matured, it scaled through a combination of client-led growth and external investment, including a $10 million raise from Investec in 2015. The investment enabled wiGroup to accelerate product development and expand distribution – both critical to building the network.
It also introduced new pressure: to scale faster, operate at a larger level, and expand into global markets. During this period, wiGroup landed pilots across Australasia, other African markets and Europe.
These were formative years. The business experienced periods of hyper-growth, but with that pace came real pressure and moments of existential threat. The team had to navigate these challenges, ultimately emerging more focused, more refined, and carrying hard-earned lessons that would shape the next chapter of the company.
New Shareholders, New Chapter
In 2020, wiGroup was fully acquired by Teya a UK based fintech company focussed on offering card acceptance “acquiring” for small merchants across the UK and Europe. wiGroup had already started developing bank card-linked loyalty and the vision was that this product could be integrated to an acquirer like Teya and distributed to their entire network overlaying loyalty and customer engagement in a frictionless way.
As part of this process, wiGroup merged with Yoyo Wallet, a UK business operating in a similar space.
Following the merger, Bevan took on the realm as group CEO, merging the teams and rebranding the combined entities as Yoyo, a single unified company and brand.
Organizing the Next Phase of Growth
As Teya acquired more companies and evolved, the focus shifted toward integrating its global businesses more tightly into a single group operating model. Through this process, Bevan worked with the Teya leadership team to assess the right structure for the next phase of the business. This ultimately led to an agreement to sell the international assets and spin out the South African operation, enabling Bevan and the management team to reinvest into a profitable, regionally focused Yoyo business.
The spin-out gave Yoyo renewed focus. It allowed the company to build on the strong platform and product foundations laid in the early years, while doubling down on its position as the leading loyalty, rewards and vouchering platform in Southern Africa.
At the same time, the sharper focus created space for the team to further productise its bank-card-linked loyalty rails for local and global expansion. The lessons learned from earlier international expansion helped the team design a solution that could integrate easily with existing acquiring networks and enable loyalty for any merchant globally in minutes. This created a more refined, scalable and globally relevant product strategy.
Today
Today, Yoyo operates as a leading rewards and loyalty platform with two core product areas:
Yoyo provides Southern Africa’s largest voucher, gift card and rewards network, with 27,000 integrated stores covering over 90% of major retail brands. Through the platform, corporates issue more than 150 million vouchers and rewards annually.
Having pioneered and launched bank-card-linked loyalty and rewards, Yoyo has evolved its offering into a frictionless customer engagement and rewards platform. The product enables merchants to create elegant customer journeys, to increase customer frequency, grow customer spend, and ultimately deliver a delightful experience for both customers and merchants alike.
Nearly two decades on, Yoyo reflects a journey of continuous reinvention: from wiWallet to wiGroup, and finally from wiGroup to Yoyo. What began as a vision to replace the wallet ultimately became a rewards network used by millions of people every day – shaped not only by the original idea, but by years of unrelenting teamwork, tenacity, hard choices and reinvention along the way.