Four years of growth at Stitch

This month marks our public Stitch-aversary. Stitch emerged from stealth in February 2021, with a goal of enabling better, easier and more efficient access to the financial system for businesses and the customers they serve. 

In a relatively short amount of time, we’ve grown from a data-focused player, to a payments provider with Pay by bank as our first offering, into a full PSP, payments orchestration system, in-person payments solution and much more – bolstered by a talented team that has also grown to support our ambitions. We consistently look for more ways we can support the clients we work with and solve more challenges in South Africa’s payments ecosystem.

“I don't really know if it's been 40 years or four months, but it's definitely been fast and exciting! Working with our team and partners has been an incredible ride filled with ups, downs and most importantly tons of growth (or as we like to say, pempe).” - Co-founder and CEO Kiaan Pillay

‍

Lightning-fast product development

When we first expanded into payments, we saw significant opportunities in the Pay by bank space. This remains a critical payment method for our clients. But it’s just one part of the payments stack. 

Over the last few years, we’ve developed and launched a host of payment methods and innovations at lightning speed - including 24/7, 365 payouts - to better meet the needs of our clients and their customers. Today, Stitch is an end-to-end provider serving clients with industry-leading customer support and help from our technical solutions team each step of the way. We’ve developed solutions that address challenges from fraud, to data evaluation, to payments orchestration and more – with a platform designed to offer industry-leading reliability and redundancies to ensure the highest level of transaction success. 

We understand that no two enterprise businesses operate the same, and believe they need flexibility, choice and optionality to ensure the best-performing payments stack possible. We’re committed to providing this for every client.

‍

The evolution of the Stitch team

Reflecting on the growth of the team over the last few years, Junaid Dadan, Co-founder + President of Stitch, said, “There are so many people that have grown and scaled with the company, who are barely recognisable in terms of their skills now vs where they started. We also have so many new people, new functions and new departments.”

One of the things we’re most proud of at Stitch is our team. We’ve built a passionate, collaborative group that cares about company culture and is always looking for more ways we can support clients and iterate on our solutions. 

Stitch Co-founder and CTO, Priyen Pillay, shared more on the growth of the engineering team in particular since Stitch began: “We’ve grown intentionally—scaling in a way that keeps us lean, focused and adaptable to customer needs and market shifts. Growth for us has never been about headcount; it’s been about impact. We’ve iterated on our operating model to ensure we stay fast and flexible while maintaining deep alignment with what brings real value to our clients. This balance allows us to be fluid—adjusting to new demands without losing focus or momentum.”

Even as our transaction volumes and client base have grown significantly, our engineering team has remained tight-knit and performance-driven. We’ve built orchestration into our core engineering philosophy, ensuring we always have multiple failovers and redundancies in place. This allows us to consistently deliver best-in-class uptime and reliability while scaling efficiently—without unnecessary headcount increase.

“One thing that hasn’t changed since day one is our engineering culture,” Priyen said. “We’ve always been a team of like-minded, highly collaborative top performers who push each other to be better. This isn’t by chance—it’s something we’ve deliberately baked into our hiring and performance processes to maintain the same high bar as we scale. It’s an ongoing mission to ensure that everyone at Stitch contributes meaningfully, sees their work in production, and drives real impact.”

The approach our team takes balances a north star mentality—building toward a long-term vision—with rapid iteration to get there. Instead of over-engineering upfront, we focus on core systems that allow us to consistently deliver value without slowing down. Prioritization at Stitch is a living process, constantly evolving to keep us shipping, improving, and staying ahead.

Spin outs, acquisitions and the next ideas

We’ve also grown in ways beyond the team and product expansion. In 2023, we spun out our first company, WigWag, as a way for the team to more deeply explore how we can serve merchants of all sizes that wish to accept payments online, while the core team remained focused on meeting the broad and complex payments requirements of large enterprise merchants. This year, we folded WigWag back under the Stitch umbrella as Stitch Express, with a clear focus on serving e-commerce merchants of all sizes that want a way to accept simple, easy payments online.

We also made our first acquisition, ExiPay, which significantly expanded our reach and our ability to serve clients, through In-person payments. Today we can support merchants that operate fully in-store, merchants selling online and businesses looking to do both.

“We're obsessed with working with our clients, and perhaps counter-intuitively (to me at least), the more we do, the hungrier we are! We're just scratching the surface on how we work with our partners, and there is so much more to be done in the South African space,” Kiaan said.

We’ve also significantly expanded the functionality of our data and reporting features, payments orchestration and reconciliation, to streamline payment operations and management for clients. Moving forward, we’re looking at new solutions beyond pure payments, including financial services and enablement, to bring more innovation to the way our clients move and manage their money. 

Priyen said, “We exist to make payments work better—so our clients can focus on building and growing their business. As the market and customer expectations evolve, we make sure businesses don’t have to navigate fragmented systems or slow-moving infrastructure. While some pieces of the payments ecosystem have been slow to evolve and remain brittle, we step in to Stitch the gaps—ensuring businesses can scale without payments being a bottleneck.”

Our focus at Stitch remains to deliver seamless, reliable payment experiences across every touchpoint—whether online or in-store. And while we move fast, we never compromise on compliance, security or stability. We work closely with our clients, adapting in real time and solving challenges before they become blockers. If there’s a better way to move money, we’ll find it—and we’ll build it the right way.

According to Stitch Co-founder, Junaid Dadan, “The core of what we do is solve problems for clients. We will always be iterating on our products, operations and team to make us better at this. The product and company will never be finished.”

‍