South African payments infrastructure company Stitch has expanded its real-time payments offering with the launch of PayShap Request for enterprise businesses.
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The service enables companies to collect payments securely and efficiently across all major South African banks, while providing near-instant settlement. With several enterprise clients already moving to real-time payment rails, the launch signals growing demand for faster, more reliable payment infrastructure.
Stitch says its multi-acquirer architecture and intelligent routing are designed to strengthen payment resilience and minimise disruptions for businesses.
PayShap Request is a payment method built on PayInc’s rapid payments infrastructure. It enables businesses to send a payment request directly to a customer's banking app, where the customer can review and approve the transaction. Settlement is near-instant, with no redirect to internet banking and no manual entry of account details required.
Stitch currently offers PayShap Request through redundant and consumer-centric routing. On the issuing side, Stitch supports all major South African banks, meaning any customer with a PayShap-enabled account can approve and complete a payment request initiated through Stitch.
Unlike others offering PayShap Request, Stitch infrastructure offers a multi-acquirer architecture. Rather than relying on a single acquiring bank, Stitch maintains active connections to multiple acquirers simultaneously.
Enterprise businesses can access:
- Redundancy: If one acquiring bank experiences downtime or processing issues, transactions are routed through an alternative acquirer automatically, helping to ensure near-continuous availability.
- Automated routing: The Stitch orchestration layer routes each transaction to the optimal acquirer based on real-time availability, performance and success rates.
- Simplified integration: Businesses can access multiple acquiring bank relationships through a single API, without managing separate contracts, integrations or reconciliation processes.
Junaid Dadan, president at Stitch, said: PayShap Request is an important step forward for real-time payments in South Africa. We've built our infrastructure to give businesses the most reliable access to these rails, with multiple acquiring banks and intelligent routing that keeps transactions flowing even when individual banks experience issues.
For enterprise businesses that depend on payment availability, this kind of resilience is critical. PayShap Request is available through the same Stitch API that powers Pay by bank, Capitec Pay, card (Visa/Mastercard), Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Wallet and Pay Later.
Businesses already integrated with Stitch can access PayShap Request without a separate build.
For more on the evolution of PayShap and what’s next in rapid payments, see the latest Stitch Between the Seams episode featuring Junaid Dadan and Israel Skosana, chief product and scheme officer at PayInc.
Stitch is one of the largest payments service providers in South Africa today and has raised $107m in total funding to date, including its recent Series B round of $55m announced in April 2025.
