Stitch Launches PayShap Request for SA Enterprise RTP

In Short

• Stitch launched PayShap Request for enterprise businesses in South Africa.
• It lets merchants request real-time payments inside a customer’s banking app.
• The product uses multi-acquirer redundancy and smart routing to reduce payment downtime.

What Happened: Stitch PayShap Request For Real-Time Payments

On August 4, 2026, Stitch launched PayShap Request for South African enterprise businesses that want to collect real-time payments across major banks. PayShap Request is a “request to pay” flow, meaning a business sends a payment request to a customer’s banking app, and the customer approves it there. Settlement happens in near real time, which is closer to an instant bank transfer than a card payment.

Stitch says several enterprise clients have already moved collections to real-time payment rails (real-time payments infrastructure that clears and settles quickly). Unlike checkout flows that redirect users to internet banking or require manual account entry, PayShap Request is designed to reduce steps and lower errors.

What Happened: Multi-Acquirer Architecture and Automated Routing

A key part of Stitch’s announcement is its “multi-acquirer architecture.” In plain terms, that means Stitch maintains live connections to more than one acquiring bank at the same time, instead of relying on a single bank to process requests.

If one acquiring bank has downtime or degraded performance, transactions can be automatically routed through another acquirer. Stitch also says it routes each transaction to the “optimal” acquirer based on real-time availability and success rates. For enterprises, this can reduce failed payments and customer support load during bank incidents.

Why It Matters: Reliability and One Integration For SA Payments Teams

For large merchants, reliability is often the main constraint when adopting real-time payment methods. A payment option that is fast but frequently unavailable can be worse than a slower one.

Stitch is positioning PayShap Request as an enterprise-grade option that prioritises resilience. It also matters operationally because merchants integrate once via Stitch’s API, then gain access to multiple acquiring relationships without separate contracts and reconciliation flows.