---
title: "What enterprise businesses should be asking their payments data"
description: "Big South African businesses process millions of payments every month. Most of what those payments could tell them goes unread. The latest offering from Stitch, an AI-driven Analytics tool, aims to change who gets to ask the questions and how fast they get answers."
type: "NewsArticle"
publisher: "Daily Maverick"
site: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za"
section: "Sponsored Content"
author: "Stitch Group"
author_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/author/stitch/"
canonical_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2026-10-15-what-enterprise-businesses-should-be-asking-their-payments-data/"
published: "2026-10-15T13:46:14"
lang: "en-ZA"
word_count: 741
---

# What enterprise businesses should be asking their payments data

> Big South African businesses process millions of payments every month. Most of what those payments could tell them goes unread. The latest offering from Stitch, an AI-driven Analytics tool, aims to change who gets to ask the questions and how fast they get answers.

By Stitch Group · Published 15 October 2026, 15:46 SAST

## Content

Every payment a business processes leaves a record. The record shows when the customer tried to pay, how, through which bank, and whether it worked. If it failed, it shows why. Add these up across a national retailer, an insurer or a telecoms company and you have one of the most detailed views of a business there is. You can see where sales are being lost, which customers are struggling and which part of checkout is costing revenue.

Yet in most organisations, very few people ever read that record. It goes into a dashboard someone built months ago and gets checked at the monthly review. By then, whatever it was showing has already cost the business money.

Consider a national retailer whose card approvals with one bank fall sharply on a Tuesday afternoon. The data shows it within minutes. But the people who could act on it aren’t looking. That’s the payments lead, the person in charge of the online store and the support team fielding complaints from customers. Maybe someone spots it a week later in a report. Maybe nobody spots it at all.

That gap between what the data knows and what the business does is the problem Stitch is looking to fix with [Pulse Analytics](https://stitch.money/pulse/analytics?utm_source=Daily+maverick&utm_medium=PR).

### **From payments to software**

Stitch that handles payments and money movement for some of South Africa’s largest retailers, insurers, telecoms, financial services companies and more. That work has given it an unusual view inside its client teams. Stitch works with nearly every part of a client’s business, including payments, risk, onboarding, finance, marketing and customer support.

As Stitch grew, it built its own internal tools for reporting, fraud and onboarding instead of waiting on outside suppliers. Over time it saw that its enterprise clients had the same problems, only much bigger.

Stitch recently launched Pulse, a suite of AI-driven software for the businesses it processes payments for. The first product is Pulse Analytics. Tools for fraud prevention and customer onboarding (KYC/KYB) are part of the suite, with more on the way.

### **An analyst for everyone, not just the analysts**

The idea behind Pulse Analytics is to give anyone in the business, from the CEO to the support desk, the ability to ask the payments data a question in plain language and get a useful answer within seconds, via their personal AI agent.

Pulse Analytics is an AI-powered dashboard and personal agent that works on a company’s own payments data. It does four things:

**It briefs.**Every morning, each user gets a short summary written for their role. It covers what moved in the business, the likely cause and what it means in rands. A finance director sees different information from a store operations manager because they care about different things.

**It answers.**Say a customer phones to ask where their refund is. A support agent can paste in the transaction ID and ask that question directly. Pulse Analytics replies with the date the refund was paid, the bank, the bank reference and when the money should arrive, along with proof of refund ready to send to the customer. Any answer can be exported to Excel or CSV, or formatted for a board pack.

**It watches.**Users can ask Pulse, in one sentence, to monitor any metric, customer, store or event. When something changes, it alerts the right person and includes the likely cause.

**It acts.**Pulse Analytics can process refunds and payouts, but only within each user’s existing permissions. Approval steps apply where they’re needed, and every action is logged in a full audit trail. Any answer can also become a chart or a live dashboard with one prompt. Dashboards are shared by role, so each person sees only the data they’re allowed to see.

### **Same-day decisions**

Speed matters, but the bigger shift is who gets to use the data. The person closest to a problem is usually the one who can fix it fastest, and that’s rarely someone in the data team. When the support agent, the store manager and the payments lead can each get answers on their own, a business can fix problems as they happen instead of explaining them a month later.

Businesses that aren’t leveraging their own data, and utilising AI to help them find answers, are already behind in the enterprise space. **DM**

**Anyone interested in Pulse Analytics can contact the Stitch team by visiting**[stitch.money.](http://stitch.money)

*Author:**Dewald Muller, Head of AI and SaaS at Stitch*