HomeStartupsStitch Expands into Nigeria’s Fintech Space with $2Million Seed Funding Innovations Stitch Expands into Nigeria’s Fintech Space with $2Million Seed Funding The unprecedented growth of digital finance in Nigeria is beneficial to the country and the continent. Stitch, the South-Africa start-up operating in the Fintech space is making a bold statement by establishing herself in Nigeria which happens to be the continent’s largest market. Stitch raised $4Million in February 2021 to make it the biggest seed round raised by an API Fintech start-up in the continent. The start-up founders Kiaan Pillay, Natalie Cuthbert, and Priyen Pillay decided to provide an API access to developers to gather data based on financial accounts across the continent. This venture allows Fintech developers to make their apps have access to users’ financial accounts. It also authenticates the users to provide their data and establish their identities before they commence payments. Stitch officially introduced her services into Nigeria with a $2Million additional seed funding to increase her infrastructural capacity in the Fintech space. The total seed investment raised since inception in quarter of the year is $6Million. The innovative endeavor of Stitch is backed by credible investors like, Raba, Firstminute Capital, CRE, Village Global, 500 Fintech, Future Africa, and Norrsken. Fintech’s heavy weight like Tom Blomfield co-founder of Monzo and GoCardless, Matt Robinson, also co-founder of GoCardless, Emile Choi President and COO of CoinBase, and Charlie Delinpole founder of ComplyAdvantage. Most African Fintech start-ups depend on card payments and regardless of the infrastructural capacity of Yoco, Flutterwave, and Paystack, limitations around chargeback fees and fraud costs still exist. Stitch solved these problems by introducing pay-by-back process to allow for efficient payment process in South-Africa. The CEO of Stitch, Kiaan Pillay, once affirmed that, “Once you make the user experience even more frictionless for pay-by bank, and as tokenizable as card, the choice to use this method over others Is fairly straight forward.” Pillay also confirmed that within 6months of pay-by-bank launch in South-Africa customer growth increased by 50% across all services. Stitch incursion into Nigeria’s fintech market was premised by an efficient instant bank settlement system and desire to pay through banks with numerous fintech applications. The uniqueness of Stitch’s presence in the market is solving the users problems based on the uniqueness of the market. The problem in Nigeria’s market is users must execute payments through their mobile bank applications. Stitch’s innovation in the market would increase growth and add value to the users because they can now initiate a user-not-present bank transfer. According to Pillay, “The opportunity is ripe, I think more and more API fintechs are recognizing that pay via credit interchange comes with a high when converting customers onto their platforms.” He also said,” Just this month alone, we’ve seen our inbound requests increase five-to-tend fold here in South-Africa, and customers are integrating us in Nigeria even as we were previously still in soft launch.” Stitch is presently in Nigeria and South-Africa, Stitch’s desire is to facilitate $10Million payments every month by the end of 2021 and with a rich client base which includes ChipperCash, Paystack, Franc, Sanlam, Yoco, and Flexiclub the fintech space in Nigeria and the continent would witness value, growth and healthy competition. Open banking increased in demand last year in the continent and Nigeria was clearly the leader in the fintech space. The competitiveness is high and barrier to market entry is low. Benjamin Dada asserted who is the country manager for Stitch, “For a start, we are offering Nigeria businesses who intend to use stitch free access to the product until the end of 2021.” Benjamin Dada would lead Stitch operations in Nigeria. Prior to joining Stitch, he was the founder of tech publications Benjamindada.com. He has experience in the Nigeria fintech space and he has worked with Eyowo, and he also worked at Tiger Global backed Fairmoney. Stitch is for sure changing the fintech’s landscape in the continent and operating in Nigeria would increase growth and add value to the fintech market. It is obvious the winner would always be the users and the user experience would be more sophisticated. Support PisonTechAfrica.com For inspiring tech content and articles, PisonTechAfrica.com is the platform to go. Great content takes a lot of resources; we are poised to motivate young start-ups and give them leverage with our platform. 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