Yoello: helping to cut out the middlemen to bring merchants and customers closer together

Yoello is a mobile payments system that aims to bring businesses and their customers closer together by simplifying the ordering and payments process. While customers enjoy an improved experience, businesses gain operational efficiencies and greater marketing and data analytics opportunities.

We spoke to Sina Yamani, CEO at Yoello, about the company's growth plans and the benefits of having a large presence in the UK.

What does your company do?

Yoello is a mobile payments platform that enables merchants to cut out the middlemen, thereby bringing them closer to their customers. We have seen a dramatic transition from cash to cards over the last 10 to 15 years and now that is quickly moving over to mobile.

Where customers have the choice of our service they are using us around 50% of the time. For customers it is easy; they do not need to download an app. Businesses get extensive data and analytics and marketing benefits. It is an inevitable move that has been happening across the world. It's a win win scenario.

We cover any sector but most of our customers are in the hospitality and retail sectors. We have partnered with a large number of companies around the globe including Square, WorldPay and Barclaycard.

Tell us about your UK and global operations.

We are about two and a half years old and we have grown significantly over the last year or so. This time last year there was probably about five of us. From there we have scaled massively and we are now 60 people. We have staff based globally in all the jurisdictions that we are in but over 60% to 70% of our staff are in the UK.

We have a presence in Cardiff which is great. There is a really strong support network for businesses like ours with Welsh organisations such as Fintech Wales and Hodge Bank to name just a few that have really helped us along the way in our rapid growth journey. Cardiff is also just a fantastic city to be based in and to work in with a friendly culture and dynamic city centre.

We are live in 6 different countries at the moment and we are targeting 15 countries by the end of the year. We are a software as a service (SaaS) company so there are no hardware requirements to use our service. We have an easily scalable global platform. 

There are really amazing schemes in the UK that really push entrepreneurism such as the Enterprise Investment Scheme and the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme that incentivise investors to kick start projects. These schemes really helped us in the very early stages

What are the main benefits to being based in the UK?

There are really amazing schemes in the UK that really push entrepreneurism such as the Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) and the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS) that incentivise investors to kick start projects. These schemes really helped us in the very early stages.

The City of London has been very helpful with their trade missions. The Department for International Trade can put us in touch with representatives in any country we want to work with. This has opened many doors for us.

There is also an atmosphere that exists in the UK where companies are very open towards partnerships. This is fantastic for us as we have almost built our entire strategy around partnerships, resellers and white labelling. Incumbents come to us to provide them with our portfolio of products. Other countries are just not as good at this as the UK.

There is also an atmosphere that exists in the UK where companies are very open towards partnerships. This is fantastic for us as we have almost built our entire strategy around partnerships, resellers and white labelling. Other countries are just not as good at this as the UK

Tell us about your company's growth ambitions.

We have built up a whole suite of products that we are focusing wholeheartedly on and we are growing significantly alongside our partners.  

We have global ambitions and want to be in every country in the next three or four years. But the UK will remain our global headquarters.