F-Squared Podcast

South Africa’s payments scene looks “solved” from the outside—until you try to wire money 50 times a day from your phone. In this candid conversation, Kiaan Pillay, CEO & co-founder of Stitch, sits down with Samora Kariuki to unpack how a scrappy side-project became the enterprise payments partner for Binance, Vodacom, Foschini Group, and more.

You’ll hear:

The origin story: screen-scraping bank portals to automate payouts and stumbling onto Africa’s “Plaid moment.”

Why enterprises cared—and the overlooked gaps in settlement, reconciliation, and fraud data that incumbents ignored.

Pivot lessons: off-boarding SMEs, doubling down on high-touch service, and hiring engineers as 24/7 support.

Capitec Pay, PayShap & mobile money—what’s really driving South Africa’s rapid shift to pay-by-bank rails.

The Binance baptism: how one high-risk client forced Stitch to mature overnight.

Enterprise sales realities: slow, lumpy, but worth the step-change in volume.

Advice for founders: make people say no, protect culture, and learn to be impatient and patient at once.

In this engaging episode of the Frontier Fintech podcast, host Samora Kariuki sits down with Ngozi Dozie, co-founder of Carbon, to unpack the untapped potential of Nigeria’s lending market. Despite Nigeria’s status as one of Africa’s largest economies, only 2–5% of its population accessed loans annually a decade ago. Ngozi reveals how Carbon seized this opportunity, starting with paper-based salary loans and evolving into a digital-first platform, revolutionizing consumer and SME finance in a market long dominated by risk-averse banks.

Ngozi shares the gritty details of Carbon’s journey, from its origins in debt collection to leveraging Nigeria’s rising smartphone penetration and payment infrastructure for its Paylater product. He discusses the power of proprietary credit scoring, which maintained a 10–13% loss rate through economic crises, and the hard lessons learned during COVID-19, when reactive decisions strained customer trust. With candor, Ngozi reflects on the complexities of transitioning to full-service banking and the strategic pivot to SME banking, driven by the insight that 50% of their retail borrowers were small business owners.

Looking ahead, Ngozi envisions Carbon as a “superpower” for customers, using AI and automation to solve not just financial but operational challenges for SMEs. From AI-powered cash flow tools to personalized advisory services, Carbon aims to redefine banking by addressing the “why” behind financial needs. This episode is a treasure trove of insights for fintech innovators, entrepreneurs, and anyone curious about building trust and value in one of Africa’s most dynamic markets.

70% of digital transformations in banks fail. The odds are even worse when you're pivoting from a niche corporate bank to a universal, tech-driven institution. But I&M Bank has bucked the trend.

In this episode, we sit down with Shameer Patel, Executive General Manager of Retail and Business Banking at I&M Bank. Shameer was instrumental in architecting I&M’s transformation—first from the CEO’s office, where he led strategy, and now at the helm of its fast-growing retail arm.