Stitch to serve as payments partner for Chipper Cash in South Africa

Today marks a historic day for us here at Stitch. Over the last nine months, we’ve been working closely with the Chipper Cash team to enable their launch in South Africa. We’re proud to serve as their payments partner as they offer free, instant peer-to-peer transfers, discounted airtime bundles, and cryptocurrency purchases in the country.

Chipper Cash is a fast-growing, cross-border payments platform for the African continent. Founded in 2018 by Ugandan Ham Serunjogi and Ghanaian Maijid Moujaled, it has become one of the highest-growth startups on the continent, raising a $100M Series C round in May 2021 just three years after launch. Chipper’s mission is to unlock global opportunities and connect Africa, one transaction at a time—and they’ve taken another step today by opening up their products to 60 million more people.

A perfect match

When we first met the Chipper team in January of this year, we were inspired by their goals and the ways in which their ethos aligned with that of Stitch: we both aim to create better financial products for Africans, and we strive to serve diverse populations and advance financial inclusion across new markets.

Chipper Cash had begun the process of exploring South Africa just nine months prior, in March 2020. With over 1.5M users on their platform, and processing over $100M in transaction volume at the time, it only made sense that they would look to unlock access for millions of customers in the South African market.

However, they faced a few issues when testing the waters: using credit and debit cards as an experimental method-of-choice to allow customers to top up their wallets, the Chipper team was met with expensive card-not-present fraud charges in addition to the poor user experience card payments provided. Moreover, the requirement to have a card imposed strict limitations on their reachable user base, forcing them to re-evaluate alternative strategies for market entry.

Enter Stitch Payments: helping the Chipper Cash team improve user experience and accessibility

At about the same time, Stitch launched the first version of our Payments product, which enables users to pay businesses via direct bank transfer payments securely and frictionlessly within the environment of the Chipper app.

A natural synergy was born: Stitch could simultaneously help improve user experience and reduce card fraud simultaneously by enabling customers to load their Chipper wallets via our secure and frictionless Payments product.

Chipper Cash Wallet Funding using Stitch

“We’re excited to be working with innovative payments partners like Stitch to enable a first-class payments experience to our platform”

– Pardon Mujakachi, VP Strategy & Partnerships at Chipper Cash

With a new payments partnership and a new experience that enables users to top up in seconds, Chipper was ready to make a splash once more in the South African market.

“We are very excited for South Africa to experience Chipper Cash and take advantage of the app’s features such as fast and safe P2P money transfers, buying discounted airtime and data, and investing in selected cryptocurrencies,” said Pardon Mujakachi, Vice President of Strategy & Partnerships at Chipper Cash.

“We’re excited to be working with innovative payments partners like Stitch to enable a first-class payments experience to our platform. We plan to work alongside them and others to constantly evolve our product and introduce additional features, such as cross-border transfers across countries within our network.”

Today, we celebrate their launch and look forward to working alongside them to serve the millions of South Africans that now have easy access to Chipper’s peer-to-peer payments, airtime purchases, and cryptocurrency offerings. With 4 million users across 7 countries in Africa and the UK, Chipper is a customer we’ll continue to look forward to supporting, in South Africa and elsewhere.

Onwards and upwards, Chipper Cash.