F-Squared Podcast Episode # 3 - From Weekend Hack to Enterprise PSP The Story of Stitch

Kiaan Pillay on Building Stitch, Serving South Africa’s Giants, and the Future of Payments in South Africa.

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Why I Wanted to Have This Discussion

This is a great episode, take it from me. During my discussion with Kiaan, there were times where he was on his phone and from the look in his eyes, I could tell that something was cooking. Turns out, a 55 million dollar fund raise was cooking. Congrats to Kiaan and his amazing team. From our discussion, it became clear why Stitch is a big deal.

I wanted to have this discussion because having followed Fintech in Africa, Stitch always struck me from a far. They had started out with a Plaid for Africa story, raised tons of money from top VCs and later pivoted to become an enterprise PSP. Whilst such drastic pivots claimed quite a number of Fintechs from the dreaded class of 2021, Stitch seemed to have not only survived, but hit a higher gear and thrived. This was definitely a conversation that I needed to have.

This conversation with Kiaan reflects an entrepreneur who comes across as extremely thoughtful, intelligent and humble. However, behind that humility lies a steely focus and grand ambition. Often a winning combo in entrepreneurship.

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, I sit down with Kiaan Pillay, CEO and CoFounder of Stitch 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.

Key Lessons Learned

1. Payments Product Strategy

• Solve real pain first: Manual workflows often expose the most urgent gaps. In Stitch’s case, payouts were the real bottleneck.

• Back-office wins > flashy UI: Enterprises cared more about net settlement, fraud signals, and custom recon files than pretty dashboards.

• Distribution beats invention: Capitec Pay and PayShap worked because they removed friction, not because they were technically novel.

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2. Finding Product-Market Fit & Pivoting

• Let users pull you: Stitch pivoted into enterprise payments because that’s what users were willing to pay for, not because of a pitch deck.

• Side projects are signals: Tinkering revealed deeper market opportunities.

• Focus sharpens results: Offboarding SMEs was hard but necessary to win the enterprise game.

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3. Enterprise Sales & Customer Success

• Enterprises want reliability: Fast support, custom settlement, and peace of mind matter more than innovation.

• Service is the differentiator: 24/7 WhatsApp support with engineers closed more deals than fancy sales pitches.

• Map power carefully: Every sale needs a detailed org chart. The buyer, approver, gatekeeper, and influencer are rarely the same person.

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4. Team Composition & Culture

• Engineering is the moat: Even at scale, Stitch stayed 65% engineers to maintain product depth and credibility.

• Hire for agency, not pedigree: Top-tier talent will join if you simply ask and present a mission worth doing.

• Engineers run support: Support was a technical function, not a call center, enabling instant response and resolution.

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5. Focus & Company Building

• Strategy is subtraction: Stitch didn’t build hardware; they bought Exipay to ride on existing terminals.

• Sometimes go deep, not wide: 20 big clients in South Africa move more volume than 2,000 SMEs.

• Volume begets leverage: Owning enterprise volume unlocks better pricing, creating a growth flywheel.

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6. Founder Mindset & Authenticity

• Tinkering creates insight: Most great ideas emerge through iteration, not ideation.

• Balance urgency and patience: Move fast, but understand that enterprise cycles are measured in quarters.

• Be real: Sharing the chaos of Slack payouts and gym-floor banking builds trust with customers and VCs alike.

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7. Venture Capital & Fundraising

• Team over traction: Investors backed Stitch early because of talent density and vision, not because of revenue.

• Learning velocity wins: The ability to grow fast through hard clients (like Binance) signals investor confidence.

• Lumpy is fine annually: Monthly growth may stall, but hitting annual targets makes enterprise fintech fundable.

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8. South African Market Specifics

• High inclusion ≠ high usage: Many banked users still operate in cash. Pay-by-bank products like Capitec Pay change that.

• Sector diversity helps: SA has real depth across telco, retail, gambling, and e-commerce — unlike many single-vertical markets.

• Small tweaks, big wins: Capitec auto-enabling online payments unlocked massive digital transaction growth with minimal change.
  

Read the Transcript

Samora Kariuki: South Africa is a very interesting payments market. You know, it's one of the most advanced financial services markets in Africa. There's around an 84% financial inclusion rate. The interesting thing about that 84% is that it's grown from 54% in 2011. But the thing that's even more interesting is that it was in fact 54% all those years back while the rest of the continent was around 20-30% at the time. So, it's an advanced financial services market. Additionally, I think a report from Stitch, which is my guest today, shows that subscription payments are projected to be around $820 million this year. The total digital payments market in the country is around $20 billion, and this is growing fast. Moreover, in addition to an advanced financial services market, there's so much innovation around the payment side from both businesses and the government. Recently, just some time back, South Africa introduced PayShap and it's growing exponentially. It's slowly being called the UPI of South Africa. Today I have Kiaan Pillay, who's the CEO and co-founder of Stitch. A very interesting entrepreneur who's going to talk to us about his journey at Stitch and the broader South African payments landscape. So Kiaan, thank you and welcome to the show.

Kiaan Pillay: Thanks so much for having me.

Samora Kariuki: Cheers man. I've been really looking forward to this conversation. I really admire some of the work you're doing. So, you know, let's start by you giving us a quick background. Who is Kiaan and just a short intro to yourself.

Kiaan Pillay: Sure. As you mentioned, I work at Stitch. I'm a bit of a payments junkie. Previously I was a developer but now would be executed if I touched any of the Stitch code base by any engineer that works here. But I've always loved tech. I've always liked tinkering, especially on things in the payment side of things. I've been at a few other African startups before this. Immediately before Stitch, I was at Smile Identity, which did pan-African identity verification APIs, and I was at Root before that, which is now insurance APIs in South Africa but was a digital bank at the time. I was there for developers, and I am South African born and bred, so yeah, excited to be chatting. These are the silly things that I geek out on.

Samora Kariuki: Fantastic. That's a very interesting background because it segues really well into the first discussion. You know, Stitch initially started off as a kind of open banking API play. I think at the time it was viewed as the Plaid for Africa. Very, very interesting starting point. Now you were an engineer, your background was an engineer. Can you just tell us the insights that led you to start off Stitch specifically as an open API player?

Kiaan Pillay: Sure. It wasn't I think… insight is very generous. I think myself and one of my co-founders were trying to build a person-to-person payments app. It was a stupid, very bad, horribly put together side project that we were working on. We largely got everything working except payouts. Right. So, we used somebody else's payments API, and we begged and borrowed banks to let us work with them, and everything we had was non-compliant. It was terrible. But we kind of got to the point where we could do everything. This was 9 to 12 months of weekends and evenings later. We put together this horrible app but could do everything except payouts. So if you said, "Hey, I want to withdraw my money into my bank account," the way it would work is that we would get a Slack notification. Whoever would see the Slack notification first would just manually log into a personal bank account and just do a payout. It was horrible, and it was a mess, and it didn't work. But actually, the user experience wasn't bad. You know, with bank A, we would log into bank A, and we'd send you the money, and you'd get it in real time. That was really nice. You know, we were doing two payments a day, five payments a day, ten payments a day, and it started to break down, I would say, when we did 50 payments a day. We had 3,000 monthly active users or something, which was really nice for us because we were just doing this as a side project, so that was a big achievement for us. But even that becomes really tedious when you're literally logging into a bank account and paying somebody out. We would pull our cars over to the side of the road because you'd see a notification, or you'd be at the gym and you drop the weights and you do this, all these horrible stupid things. So I think one night we were tinkering, and we're like, this is just so dumb. Let's automate this.

Kiaan Pillay: What are we doing? We're filling in forms, and we're navigating a website. So I think insight was more that we could screen scrape and do this. It was like, oh, you could literally screen scrape into a bank account, you could enter username, password, you click login, you could navigate to a page, you could check out. It sounds a little ridiculous now to think about it, but when you get to that point where you have bank/payout and you hit that endpoint and it screenshots and it does whatever and it eventually executes the payment, it's super cool. If you think about it, this was five years ago, and you're like, "Oh my word, this is an API for a bank account." Which it's not, and it wasn't the case or anything like that, but as a concept, it's really, really cool. I think what was encouraging or interesting for us is that we were like, "Ah, this is kind of like open banking, and this is what Plaid used to do, and this is what Tink and TrueLayer do way back in the past." We're like, "Oh, but they did it all with APIs, and they have all these very fancy systems and these very Western markets." Actually, to some extent, a lot of these people just did this. They just became really good at screen scraping at scale precisely in seemingly very modern markets. But for the longest time, Klarna was screen scraping, and Tink was screen scraping, and these are billion-dollar companies. They are working at a huge scale. So that was the start for us. To be honest, I wish we were really clever and said we saw this huge gap in the market or this or that. But we were just tinkering around on a lot of stuff, and we were technically, as developers, able to do this. I think these clever people in the world building billion-dollar companies are doing it somewhere else. This must be a thing. And that's what we ended up doing. So no real intelligence.