Between the Seams with Stitch

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Go Between The Seams with the founders, leaders, builders and investors behind South Africa’s most ambitious businesses and those behind some of the global companies shaping the future. We dive into how these businesses were built from the ground up, how they’re navigating shifting consumer demands, and what real innovation looks like in South Africa, and beyond.

Episodes

  1. What’s next in modern healthcare | Aliyah Allie, X, Bigly Labs

    3 days ago

    What’s next in modern healthcare | Aliyah Allie, X, Bigly Labs

    In this episode of Between the Seams, Stitch President Junaid Dadan sits down with Aliyah Allie, Managing Director of X, Bigly Labs (Dis-Chem Group’s innovation hub), to discuss the high-stakes digital transformation of one of South Africa’s most essential retail organizations. Aliyah pulls back the curtain on how Dis-Chem is tackling the country’s massive healthcare accessibility gap. They move beyond the protein powder aisles to dissect the “spoeg en plak” reality of maintaining 40-year-old legacy systems while building the health center of the future. Aliyah shares deep insights into their unique nurse-led clinic model, the intricate challenge of rebuilding pharmacy software that dates back to the seventies, and why purposeful friction—or "healthy conflict"—between innovation hubs and the mothership is the only way to move at the speed of customer expectation. From the ethics of Agentic AI in clinical settings to the simple power of "dog-fooding", this conversation speaks to the importance of modernizing complex, highly regulated enterprise infrastructure without losing sight of the human on the other side of the counter.

    47 min
  2. Re-engineering South Africa's payment system | Arif Ismail, SARB

    17 Jun

    Re-engineering South Africa's payment system | Arif Ismail, SARB

    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 day Why the SARB took a stake in Pay Inc and what that shift means for the industry The macroeconomic case for digital payments, including research showing a shift from cash to digital can add up to 0.5% to GDP What South Africa can learn from Brazil's Pix and India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI), and what it should not copy The Payments Ecosystem Modernisation (PEM) programme: what it is, what it is trying to fix and how it is being resourced Why a standardised QR code framework matters for bridging the gap between mobile and card penetration The cross-border payments opportunity, and the plan to connect SADC, Africa and eventually the world Arif's vision for what South Africa's payment system looks like by 2030 The #500 target: getting PayShap from 60 million to 500 million transactions per month Between 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.

    44 min
  3. Engineering trust at scale | Ashish Aggerwal, PayPal Ventures

    19 May

    Engineering trust at scale | Ashish Aggerwal, PayPal Ventures

    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.

    44 min
  4. Building for the next frontier | Ashley Martin, Superbalist

    19 May

    Building for the next frontier | Ashley Martin, Superbalist

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

    32 min
  • 4 Episodes

About

Go Between The Seams with the founders, leaders, builders and investors behind South Africa’s most ambitious businesses and those behind some of the global companies shaping the future. We dive into how these businesses were built from the ground up, how they’re navigating shifting consumer demands, and what real innovation looks like in South Africa, and beyond.

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