Ask a South African finance team what it takes to pay a supplier in New York and the answer comes back as a list rather than a number. Find a rate. Work out which reporting code the Reserve Bank wants recorded against the payment. Get the invoice and the supporting documents to a bank that will do the conversion. Then wait two or three days for the money to turn up at the other end.
Stitch, the local payments company, has built a service that takes most of that list off the client's desk. Announced on 16 September, cross-border invoice settlement lets a business pay an offshore invoice in US dollars or another major currency through a single provider, and Stitch says settlement happens the same day or the next.
Underneath it, three parties still do three jobs. The business puts rands into a collection account the Stitch Group operates. CrissCross FX, a treasury outsourcing company inside the group that the Reserve Bank has approved for the role, sources the exchange rate and instructs the bank. A South African authorised dealer bank, which is the only party permitted to do it, performs the conversion, sends the money out and files the reporting the Reserve Bank requires on every payment that leaves the country.
What actually changes for the client
The bank leg does not disappear, and Stitch does not pretend it does. What changes is who assembles the paperwork. Stitch says it captures the correct codes, the invoice and the supporting documents on every transaction so the bank's reporting is accurate, which lifts that work off a finance team that mostly does not want it. Rates come out of what the company calls deep liquidity pools rather than a negotiation with a bank's forex desk, and the whole thing runs from one dashboard where a client can check a rand balance, book a deal, accept a rate and upload documents. There is an API for clients who would rather not open a dashboard at all.
No crypto leg
Stitch says this twice, once in the announcement and again in its own questions and answers: none of it touches crypto. Rands go in, a fiat currency comes out, and no stablecoin sits in the middle. In a market where cross-border payment pitches have often run through one, saying so plainly is the point.
The target is businesses that pay offshore invoices with any regularity, which Stitch lists as companies settling software and technology vendors, importers paying suppliers inside agreed terms, and firms carrying foreign-exchange and treasury work as an internal overhead they would rather hand to someone else.
One caveat travels with all of it. Every load-bearing claim here, the two-to-three-day comparison included, is Stitch describing its own product. Beyond a spokesperson discussing it on RSG Geldsake on 18 September, no independent outlet has tested it.
