Stitch Rolls Out Payments Product LinkPay

South African API infrastructure startup Stitch has launched LinkPay, which the company bill as its “core payments product.”

According to a Monday (April 25) announcement, LinkPay “is the first payments solution that tokenizes financial accounts and enables variable recurring payments. Now, your customers can link their preferred financial accounts via Stitch and enjoy a payments experience as convenient as a card, but without high fees or fraud.”

Learn more: South African API Startup Stitch Raises $21M Series A Round

After linking their account, returning customers can make a payment with a single click without having to log in again. The company says LinkPay can be combined with its product suite, allowing users to do things such as send refunds or enable withdrawals to the same verified account used for a pay-in.

“Marketplaces and platforms (such as ride-hailing services) can enable their users to tokenize a bank account for seamless checkouts while also operating payouts to their suppliers,” the release said. “eCommerce businesses can build one-click checkouts by allowing returning users to save a bank account, rather than a card, at a fraction of the conversion cost and minimal fraud.”

Earlier this year, Stitch raised $21 million in a Series A funding round that the company said it would use to help accelerate the fuel Africa’s rapidly expanding FinTech sector. That followed a $6 million in a seed round last year after coming out of stealth in February 2021.

See also: API Firm Empowers African FinTechs to Scale

The funding will also be used to build what Stitch calls the “financial graph,” which CEO Kiaan Pillay described as an infrastructure for financial building blocks that can operate across regions, providers, banks, and other types of financial accounts, letting businesses write code once, launch in multiple markets and scale faster.

Speaking to PYMNTS in February, Pillay — who is also the co-founder of Stitch — talked about the inspiration for the company.

“Our goal was really to make it easy for FinTechs on the continent to start and to scale,” he said. “[And] as we continue to do this, the harder problems like moving money begin to show. Moving money between ecosystems, individuals and geographies is really, really tricky.”