Between the Seams with Stitch

South Africa has had real-time payment infrastructure since 2006. Brazil's Pix launched in 2020 and already does 33 transactions per capita per month. South Africa's PayShap is at one. In this episode of Between the Seams, Stitch President and Co-founder Junaid Dadan sits down with Arif Ismail, Head of the National Payment System Department (NPSD) at the South African Reserve Bank, to get into why that gap exists and what's being done to close it.Arif has built and overseen South African payments from almost every vantage point: loading ATMs and fixing point-of-sale terminals in the early 2000s, building foundational infrastructure at Absa, leading strategy at PASA, heading oversight at the SARB and spending four years at the IMF working on payment system policy across advanced and emerging economies globally.In this episode they cover:How SAMOS and the RTGS system work, and why R584 billion flows through it every dayWhy the SARB took a stake in Pay Inc and what that shift means for the industryThe macroeconomic case for digital payments, including research showing a shift from cash to digital can add up to 0.5% to GDPWhat South Africa can learn from Brazil's Pix and India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI), and what it should not copyThe Payments Ecosystem Modernisation (PEM) programme: what it is, what it is trying to fix and how it is being resourcedWhy a standardised QR code framework matters for bridging the gap between mobile and card penetrationThe cross-border payments opportunity, and the plan to connect SADC, Africa and eventually the worldArif's vision for what South Africa's payment system looks like by 2030The #500 target: getting PayShap from 60 million to 500 million transactions per monthBetween the Seams is the Stitch podcast that features the founders, leaders, builders and investors shaping South Africa's most ambitious businesses and the global companies connecting to this market. Subscribe for new episodes and visit stitch.money/bts to learn more.

Ashish Aggarwal (Partner at PayPal Ventures) offers Stitch President Junaid Dadan a global lens on local innovation and why the "death of the checkout app" is imminent.

Stitch CTO Priyen Pillay sits down with Ashley Martin (CTO of Superbalist) to discuss building for the next frontier of Agentic Commerce.