If you've booked a FlySafair flight on the app recently, bought something on Bash, or topped up your EasyEquities account, there's a good chance Stitch handled the payment. The Cape Town-based payments infrastructure company has been steadily accumulating enterprise clients without making much noise about it. This week's FlySafair integration (bringing Apple Pay and Google Pay to the airline's mobile app) is the latest, but it's part of a pattern.

The client list tells the story of a company that has moved well beyond startup fintech into core enterprise infrastructure.

FlySafair (as of this week): Apple Pay and Google Pay on the airline's mobile app. Stitch's own data shows Apple Pay conversion rates run 42% higher than standard card payments, with 50% of transactions completing in under three seconds. For a high-value, high-intent transaction like a flight booking (where the customer has already entered ID numbers, phone numbers, and dietary requirements), removing friction at the payment step directly impacts whether the booking completes or gets abandoned.

Bash (TFG): One of the first SA retailers to build a genuinely unified commerce offering — same payments infrastructure for online and in-store. Stitch powers the payment layer across channels.

EasyEquities: Instant deposits and 24/7 withdrawals, enabling frictionless investing. The integration removed the delay between deciding to invest and actually having the funds available.

In each case, the pattern is the same: Stitch sits between the customer-facing app and the banking/card infrastructure, handling the complexity so the enterprise doesn't have to build it.

This is where it gets interesting for anyone building or running an SA business.

Three weeks ago, Stitch published a technical blog post aimed at CTOs and engineering teams. The headline concept: agentic commerce. The argument: the next wave of online transactions won't be initiated by humans browsing screens and typing in card numbers. It will be AI agents — autonomous software that discovers products, compares suppliers, negotiates terms, and executes payments on behalf of users.

This isn't science fiction. Google launched its Universal Commerce Protocol at the National Retail Federation conference in January 2026, co-developed with Shopify, Etsy, Walmart, Target, and endorsed by Mastercard, Visa, Stripe and others. ChatGPT already has instant checkout functionality powered by Stripe. According to IBM research from January 2026, 45% of consumers already use AI for at least part of their buying journey.

Stitch's point to SA businesses is specific and urgent: if your checkout flow relies on humans reading screens and manually entering OTPs or card numbers, you will lose AI-driven sales. The company is telling engineering teams to rebuild their APIs to be machine-readable and policy-aware — meaning AI agents can be given programmable spending limits, real-time authorisation controls, and the ability to execute transactions within user-defined boundaries without human intervention at each step.

For SA e-commerce specifically, this matters because the market is still catching up on the basics. Many SA online retailers still rely on redirect-based payment flows, manual 3D Secure authentication, and checkout processes designed for desktop browsers. The gap between where SA payments infrastructure is today and where it needs to be for agentic commerce is significant — and that gap is exactly where Stitch is positioning itself.

The practical takeaway has two time horizons.

Now: If you're running an e-commerce business or any high-value online transaction flow and you haven't integrated digital wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay), you're leaving conversion on the table. Stitch's data suggests a 42% conversion uplift is available just from adding wallet payments. That's not a marginal improvement. For a business doing R10 million a month in online sales, that could be the difference between a good quarter and a great one.

Next: The businesses that will win in the agentic commerce era are the ones whose payment and product infrastructure is machine-readable. That means structured product data, deterministic APIs, programmable payment authorisations, and checkout flows that don't require a human to click through five screens. Stitch is building the infrastructure layer for this transition in SA, and the enterprises already on the platform (FlySafair, TFG, EasyEquities) will have a head start.

The question for every SA business running online payments is whether you want to be ready when AI agents start buying on behalf of your customers — or whether you want to be the checkout they skip because your systems can't talk to machines.

This news first appeared in our 19 March ‘26 newsletter on MyPetFriends pet-sitter finder.

Read how SA businesses are rethinking expense management with virtual cards for business expenses. See how payments are evolving beyond devices in deviceless digital payments. And explore the broader SA AI adoption picture in South Africa AI adoption 2026.

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