Announcing the launch of our new product line: Stitch payments is now live.
Stitch was born with the belief that unlocking access to bank data would accelerate the rate of innovation across the continent, a concept often referred to as open banking. We believed that enabling businesses to easily build on top of banking data would lead to the development of revolutionary financial products.
So far, we’ve been spot on. Since emerging from stealth in February of this year, we’ve been completely floored by the ingenuity of the businesses that we work with, from apps supporting novel ways to save, to bricks-and-mortar vendors finding ways to offer loans to their customers. We’ve been able to witness how the power of open banking data has unlocked product opportunities across hundreds of businesses.
However, we quickly realized that access to data alone wasn’t meeting all the needs of our customers. Today, we’re proud to announce the launch of our second product line: Stitch Payments.
It became clear to us early on that, beyond the difficulties of retrieving user data, businesses struggled to find affordable ways of accepting payments on their platforms – with more and better options for the user. Card payments, for instance, are not extremely common on the continent, and in some markets, like South Africa, they incur high fees. As noted in Quartz earlier this month – bank transfers represent a significant portion of payment options in major markets, like South Africa and Nigeria.
Other options for bank payments, however, presented additional challenges. For instance, Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) – a robust interbank transfer rail – enables direct account-to-account payments for a fraction of the cost compared to card technology. However, manual EFTs are prone to user error, leading to high drop-off and potential fraud. Many InstantEFT players that have launched in the market in the last few years face UI, UX and security barriers to mass adoption, such as conflicting branding, multiple unnecessary screens, and long load times.
We set out to solve this challenge by leveraging the infrastructure we had constructed for open banking data to help businesses move money more quickly, securely, and for lower fees – with a better user experience that could also improve conversion rates and reduce drop-off.
Users log in via Stitch once, and pay with just one click every time after
As we’ve begun to roll out our Payments product to customers (new and old), we’ve seen that the demand for a more cost-effective and frictionless payments solution is growing, not only among the newest and smallest businesses, but also for the largest fintechs, retailers, marketplaces and platforms, in South Africa and beyond.
Stitch has always focused on building robust financial infrastructure. As a result, we’re launching a number of new Payments offerings to continue to meet the needs of our customers, including:
Of course, we’re just getting started on our mission to transform the way people move money. Between disbursements, instant settlement, recurring payments, reconciliation support, and merchant dashboards; we’re bringing on a ton of new features in the coming months that we believe can better help the businesses we work with to grow and serve their users. Look out for a website update that will share more on our latest offering.
Want to learn more about how Stitch Payments can help your business accept one-click bank transfers? Get in touch.