Looking back on 2025 at Stitch

What a year it’s been at Stitch! 2025 has seen several acquisitions, expansion into new categories and continued growth in our enterprise client base - while we kicked off Stitch Express with a rapidly-growing offering for South Africa’s e-commerce space. 

As we reflect on 2025, we underscore our commitment to helping South African businesses optimise their payments stack, streamline operations and set themselves up well for long-term scale. Thank you to all our clients and partners that continue to trust us with even more of their payments needs.  

Expanding our infrastructure with in-person payments

We kicked off the year with our first acquisition announcement, solidifying our expansion into in-person payments through the acquisition of ExiPay. 

This acquisition has allowed us to support unified commerce experiences and omnichannel payments for enterprise clients such as Bash. It also offers the benefit of a single view across channels, more efficient reconciliation and the flexibility to pair our robust digital payments stack with in-store solutions, while enabling more personalisation and the ability to offer alternative payment methods at point of sale. With this acquisition, Stitch moved closer to powering the full lifecycle of enterprise payments across environments.

Reaffirming our commitment to e-commerce with Stitch Express

This year we took lessons learned after a year of WigWag and brought the brand back under Stitch to form Stitch Express. Express today is focused squarely on serving e-commerce merchants that operate on Shopify and Woo with simple, high-converting curated payment methods.

This shift aligned the Express product more closely with the Stitch brand and gave e-commerce businesses a high-performing option for accepting payments that leverages the same reliable platform our enterprise clients enjoy.

We also gave the Stitch Express product set a refresh with our Spring/Summer 2025 launch. This included upgrades designed to boost conversion for online sellers, simplify integration and offer more flexibility across payment types. It also included a Xero integration to make recon and accounting easier. These improvements reflect our continued focus on building tools that help e-commerce businesses accelerate growth with fast, reliable and optimised payments journeys.

Powering future growth with our Series B funding

In April we announced our $55 million Series B funding round. This investment strengthened our ability to continue building deep payments infrastructure for enterprise businesses in South Africa, and allowed us to accelerate expansion into key areas identified by our clients as pain points.

The funding supports the development of new products designed to increase performance and reliability across the stack, from card acquiring (thanks to the next acquisition from the Stitch Group, Efficacy) to 24/7, 365 payouts. It also allows us to expand our engineering and operations teams so we can maintain the level of precision, speed and white-glove service our clients expect.

Enabling card acquiring to better serve enterprise merchants

Later in the year, Stitch Group acquired Efficacy Payments, a Designated Clearing System Participant (DCSP) by the SARB. Adding Efficacy Payments to the Stitch Group enabled the Group to offer card acquiring services directly via Efficacy. It reflects our commitment to deep infrastructure, reducing reliance on intermediaries and giving clients access to a stronger, more reliable and more cost-effective acquiring stack.

This development also gives us greater control over performance metrics, such as approval rates, error resolution times and overall uptime. It helps us engineer more consistent results for enterprise businesses that process large volumes of card transactions.

The latest consumer payments report

As part of our commitment to equipping clients with actionable insights, we released the 2025 edition of The State of Consumer Payments in South Africa. This report provided a detailed view of how consumers choose to pay across sectors, how these preferences are evolving and where businesses can gain an advantage through better payment experiences.

The findings reinforced the growing importance of flexibility, reliability and trust in payment choice. They also highlighted areas where improved infrastructure can unlock measurable gains in conversion and customer satisfaction. 

Going deeper to serve more of South Africa’s largest enterprises

This year, we also added even more impressive clients to our roster, as we continue to work with the largest and fastest-growing businesses operating in South Africa, across sectors. These businesses trust us with more than just the implementation of individual payment methods - we’ve established deep relationships with our clients and act as true partners across their payments world to recommend new innovations, continually optimise their existing infrastructure and bring insights from the wider industry.

See how we work with clients here. 

Looking ahead

We’ve got a ton in store for 2026, with some exciting new products ready to launch out the gate in Q1. With new capabilities in acquiring, strengthened in-person payments infrastructure, expanded e-commerce tooling and a reinforced brand, we are focused on deepening our impact across South Africa’s payments ecosystem.

We look forward to partnering with even more clients to co-create the next generation of payments experiences in 2026 and seeing our existing partners continue to grow.

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