Stitch, a South African fintech platform on a mission to make Africa a world-leader in fintech has raised $4m and come out of stealth to do just that.
Stitch builds is building the Stitch API to make it easier for African fintech developers to create new, improved, more ambitious products and has been in stealth busy listening to customers and building an API to solve fintech developers’ most important problems.
First reported by TechCrunch, the $4m seed round, was led by Raba Capital and Firstminute Capital among others.
According to Kiaan Pillay, Co-Founder and CEO Stitch, “We raised this round because we want to solve this problem in a hurry, and across Africa. We’ve created a developer-centric API infrastructure, where we handle all the hard stuff, like security, privacy and compliance. We want to make fintech accessible and affordable, enabling domain innovators to innovate.”
Other seed investors include CRE, Village Global, 500 FinTech, FutureAfrica, Norrsken Foundation, Musha Ventures, Iqram Magdon Ismail, Michael Vaughan, Niklas Adalberth, David De Picciotto, Charley Ma, Sima Gandhi, Iyinoluwa “E” Aboyeji, Marc Bhargava, Carl Tremblay, Calanthia Mei, André Mohammed, Hannes Graah, Nitesh Banta, Eli Pollak, Aaron Fu, Johan Bosini, Wayne Stocks, Tom Phillips and other great investors.
“We started Stitch because we think building fintech is broken in Africa today. Compliance is hard and there’s no infrastructure, making building products painful and slow — and expensive,” added Pillay.
Stitch consolidates users’ finances and accounts in one place with rich and detailed transactions and gives users receive rich transactional data about transactions, including categories and merchant information. It helps users link multiple accounts and gives users a way to engage with their transactions and accounts in a “human” way, with no extra effort from them.
The API can be used for transactions, balance, identity, accounts, personal finance and lending. For lending, users get a full picture of an applicant’s finances, income, assets, outstanding liabilities in a single step.
Users also get a digital affordability check to simplify the process of loan application. The API helps users to submit lengthy pages of information or retrieve documents from elsewhere.
For insurance, users can manage their customer’s life cycle from onboarding and engagement, all the way to claims via a seamless process. claims process.
Under its Payments feature, users can initiate a payment directly from their bank account, from within their product. The platform is perfect for wallet funding use cases such as person-to-person payments, cryptocurrency, savings and investments.
Stitch also aims to empower users to maintain and grow their assets, savings and investments by allowing users to initiate bank transfers to digitise funding, instantly and cheaply. Users can save or invest automatically and as well manage expenses, pay bills, send payroll and capture financial results. Business users can also simplify invoice payouts and provide customers with simple bank-to-bank payments.