South African payments company Stitch has acquired ExiPay, expanding its reach in both online and in-person payments via the takeover.
The company aims to take advantage of the growth of e-commerce in South Africa, which is progressing at a slow but steady pace. Stitch notes that around 6% of retail transactions took place online in the country in 2024, with this projected to reach 10% in 2025.
By acquiring ExiPay, the firm hopes to capitalise on this steady growth by integrating multi-lane retail and omnichannel commerce businesses via a unified platform. ExiPay’s existing partnerships with the likes of retail brand Bash have also been highlighted as of significance by its new owner.
Stitch Co-Founder and President, Junaid Dadan, said: “We’re excited to bring the ExiPay solution into the Stitch payments suite, enabling enterprise merchants to offer a seamless and reliable payments experience no matter where their customers choose to shop and manage all their transactions in one place.
“ExiPay has built a strong solution that, combined with our existing online payments platform, will allow us to serve our clients from a much more holistic perspective, supporting them across every payments touchpoint they have with their customers.”
Stitch’s acquisition of ExiPay comes at a time of heightened interest in the African finance, payments and fintech markets both from within the continent and from major stakeholders further afield in Europe and North America.
South Africa in particular has the potential to become a lucrative market for fintech firms, both domestic and international. The country is Africa’s largest economy with over US$400bn in GDP last year.
This is not to say that South Africa does not have a rocky history regarding its financial industry, with the country having only exited the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) greylist in November last year – though this has not stopped major companies like Mastercard taking an interest in it.
Looking beyond South Africa’s borders, Nigeria and Kenya stand out as finance markets, with the latter’s M-Pesa now used across eight countries. Meanwhile, the former is attracting attention from the likes of Visa, which invested in Nigeria-headquartered Moniepoint earlier this year.