South Africa’s payments scene looks “solved” from the outside—until you try to wire money 50 times a day from your phone. In this candid conversation, Kiaan Pillay, CEO & co-founder of Stitch, sits down with Samora Kariuki to unpack how a scrappy side-project became the enterprise payments partner for Binance, Vodacom, Foschini Group, and more.
You’ll hear:
The origin story: screen-scraping bank portals to automate payouts and stumbling onto Africa’s “Plaid moment.”
Why enterprises cared—and the overlooked gaps in settlement, reconciliation, and fraud data that incumbents ignored.
Pivot lessons: off-boarding SMEs, doubling down on high-touch service, and hiring engineers as 24/7 support.
Capitec Pay, PayShap & mobile money—what’s really driving South Africa’s rapid shift to pay-by-bank rails.
The Binance baptism: how one high-risk client forced Stitch to mature overnight.
Enterprise sales realities: slow, lumpy, but worth the step-change in volume.
Advice for founders: make people say no, protect culture, and learn to be impatient and patient at once.