Stitch, a South African open banking and payments platform, has launched PayShap Request for enterprise customers, connecting them to PayInc's real-time payments infrastructure through a multi-acquirer architecture that routes transactions to the optimal acquiring bank based on live availability and success rates.
PayShap Request sends a payment request to a customer's banking app, where the customer reviews and approves the transaction. Settlement completes in near real time with no redirect to internet banking and no manual entry of account details. Stitch supports all major South African banks on the issuing side, which means any customer holding a PayShap-enabled account can receive and approve a request sent through the platform.
Most PayShap Request providers connect to a single acquiring bank. Stitch maintains active connections to multiple acquirers at once, so when one experiencing downtime or processing issues, the transaction routes to an alternative acquirer without any action required from the merchant or customer. The same orchestration layer selects the acquirer with the highest real-time success rate on each transaction.
Junaid Dadan, President at Stitch, described what the architecture change means for enterprises that depend on payment availability:
"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."
Several Stitch enterprise clients have already moved to real-time payment rails. PayShap Request runs through the same Stitch API that covers Pay by Bank, Capitec Pay, card payments on Visa and Mastercard, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Wallet and Pay Later, so businesses already on the platform can access PayShap Request without a separate integration build.
