South Africa-based Revio helps SaaS and subscription businesses across Africa better manage recurring payments and collections. Stitch and Revio have partnered to offer Revio customers a simple and secure way to enable payments via bank transfer, and improve their user experience.

With the advent of the pandemic and a surge in adoption of digital services, consumer demand for subscription-based products has created the imperative for many businesses to find ways to conveniently charge recurring payments.

Revio was created to offer SaaS businesses and their customers more choice and flexibility when it comes to payments. Today, Revio clients have access to multiple payment options, including pay by linked bank account via Stitch, and payments via card, DebiCheck, and more.

“The idea behind Revio is to allow our customers to offer their users more choice, with a number of convenient API integrations that can make payments easier,”  said Revio’s Chief Commercial Officer, Pieter Grobbelaar.

Since launching in March 2021, Revio has seen significant growth and has added ten payment providers and payment gateways to the platform.

Revio x Stitch

The Revio team partnered with Stitch to offer their clients a convenient and low-fee payment alternative that can improve a user’s experience and make it easier for them to make payments on a consistent basis.

Businesses that accept recurring payments often struggle with a few key pain points:

• missed collections due to insufficient balances in users’ bank accounts or lack of convenient payment options
• high costs for payments and frequently disputed debit orders
• high instance of fraud from card transactions
• long and arduous customer journeys, leading to churn and drop off

With its tokenisation technology, Stitch’s platform is a natural fit for Revio’s payments requirements, as Stitch enables users to link their bank accounts once so that they can conveniently make all future payments with just one click – without the high fees and fraud from card payments.

“Today, people want to be able to choose their payment method,” Grobbelaar said. “Whether it’s paying by bank with Stitch, via direct debit, or with cash, what we’re seeing is that customers value having a choice based on what they can afford at that particular time.”

Revio chose Stitch for several reasons. “Stitch offers something others in the market don’t: we want to enable a client to verify that a customer has funds in their account before a subscription payment is drawn,” Grobbelaar said.

Moreover, Stitch’s bank-side integrations mean that it could offer deeper payments solutions to help Revio construct merchant-specific use-cases. “With Stitch, once a user’s bank account is linked and permissions granted, the client is able to view a user’s transaction and balance data, in addition to enabling a payment initiation. With Stitch’s income estimation solution, they can leverage this data to understand whether the user has enough funds in their account to complete the payment before initiating a debit.

“The settlement time Stitch offers on a direct debit vs industry standard is great, and their one-click payments is a huge draw. In the payments space, it’s all about the race to zero. In direct debit it’s the race down to one click for a purchase.”

What’s next for Revio?

In 2022, the Revio team is looking to expand across Africa and into other emerging markets. Due to high demand, these plans have been fast-tracked, and they already have clients going live in Morocco, Nigeria and more in the coming months.

“Expansion has happened very quickly; we were looking to grow into new markets in Q3 this year, but due to the incredible growth we’ve seen, we’re focusing on this now,” Grobbelaar said.

Subscription models continue to grow and see success across the world, but businesses still face challenges with collections for subscription payments in Africa. “We want to be part of the growth of this industry,” Grobbelaar said. “And we want to take Stitch with us wherever we can. Our goal is to have a partnership running in multiple countries and see what we can do together in the future across those markets. We’re already in Nigeria and will be looking to integrate there as well.”

Grobbelaar and the team see a bright future for subscription services in Africa, though they may look different than they do in the rest of the world. For instance, wallet-based fintech applications continue to grow in adoption on the continent, and in many cases serve as an entry point into digital financial services rather than a traditional bank. As financial inclusion rises, Grobbelaar sees more opportunities for global businesses looking to reach African consumers.

“I see a future for subscription payments in which global businesses looking to enter African markets and accept payments from customers on the ground can partner with someone like Revio and Stitch, to extend their services to customers on the continent,” he said.

Today, Revio has 100+ merchants signing up every month, with a 30% MoM increase in customer retention and revenue. They currently offer ten payment methods, including Stitch. Users can sign up and get started in five minutes, and become validated in 24 hours or less.

We’re excited to work with Revio as one of our first channel partners. We can’t wait to see where the team goes next! If you’re a subscription business looking to offer better and more convenient payment methods for your customers, ask Revio how you can integrate with Stitch.

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