Year in Review 2026

As 2026 draws to a close, Digiata reflects on a milestone year. We celebrated 25 years in business, put our first AI-built solution into production, and brought our teams together behind a single value proposition. This was the year we stepped fully into our role as an AI-first engineering partner to financial services.  

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Celebrating 25 Years

September 2026 marked 25 years since Digiata was founded with one goal: to become the preferred integration partner to the financial services industry.  

Today, Digiata sits at the heart of mission-critical systems for many of the region's largest banks, insurers and asset managers, built on long-term relationships. Through it all, our philosophy has stayed the same: smart people, trusted technology and years of experience, delivering fast, reliable solutions.  

“For a quarter of a century, we have focused on the problems no one else wanted to solve—the high-stakes, high-volume complexity of the back office,” said Nemanja Stabic, CEO of Digiata. “Our 25-year journey has been about building an 'Architecture of Trust.' We quantify our success not by our visibility, but by the seamless reliability we provide to the institutions that South Africans rely on most.”  

We thank our clients for their trust, and our people for earning it every day. Learn more about Digiata at 25.  

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Strategy and Market Expansion

This year, we brought our Product and Business Applications teams closer together to operate as one united front, reflecting how the two already work together day-to-day. Our unified goal is to empower financial services leaders to deliver change faster through AI-driven engineering capability and deep domain expertise: accelerating client outcomes, raising the ceiling on delivery, and applying financial services know-how to solve the right problems.  

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‍Strengthening Our UK Ties

As our UK business grows, Digiata joined the UK South Africa Chamber of Commerce, a strong platform to bridge two markets we know and care about deeply. Our partnership with Affinity Initiative continues to open doors across the UK insurance market, and we renewed our corporate partnership with the Camelot Network, extending our access to some of the world’s leading insurers. ‍

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Welcoming New Clients

This year we welcomed new clients in both South Africa and the UK, won through trust, strong relationships and deep expertise in our domain. Among them are several UK insurers, including some of the industry's leaders. Our work with them spans the full modernisation journey: leading discovery for core system modernisation, managing controlled, fully reconciled migrations from legacy platforms, and strengthening data foundations to reduce manual effort and risk. In every case, clients are counting on us to make sure critical data lands cleanly and accurately.

To all our clients, new and long-standing: thank you for trusting us with your most critical systems every day. That trust has been earned over 25 years, and we work to build on it every single day. It is a privilege to deliver innovation that helps you set the standard in your markets.‍

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Innovation: Building at AI Speed

In 2025, we completed our first AI proof of concept. In 2026, we took AI into production.  

Our focus this year is on building a new set of AI-assisted tools to create and operate custom software for financial services. Stadium 8 generates user interfaces; companion tooling generates the APIs, workflows, and integrations behind them; and the new Linx Portal brings it together, letting teams build, run, monitor, and manage applications and their databases and storage in one place.  

Our AI framework is based on patterns refined over 25 years of building enterprise systems in regulated environments, so every application meets the same architectural, security and operational standards. It produces real, reviewable source code rather than opaque artefacts, and clients keep full control over testing, approval, release to production and where their applications run.  

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‍From Methodology to Production

In practice, Stadium 8 is already delivering user interfaces 30–50% faster, with production-ready, compliant code and a consistent approach that scales from simple dashboards to complex enterprise systems. Our first solution built this way is now live: it replaced a manual spreadsheet process with automated reconciliation of investor transactions against bank and custodian balances, giving the client a reliable, real-time view of cash.  ‍

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Real-Time Payments with PayShap

PayShap is designed to be a viable alternative to cash, with a core focus on making digital payments work for all South Africans. It targets low-value, high-volume payments still mostly made in cash and doubles as platform infrastructure for the next wave of payments modernisation.  

As more of these payments go digital, Digiata is investing in bringing PayShap into enterprise payment workflows. Our live integration uses a dedicated processing thread to deliver real-time liquidity without disrupting legacy batch processing and provides finance teams with a single ISO 20022-compliant interface in place of fragmented banking gateways.   Read the case study.

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Expanding Our Network

This year we invested in the communities where our clients and peers come together, from private dinners to seminars, industry clubs and conferences.  
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Reaching the Actuarial Community: On the eve of the Actuarial Society of South Africa (ASSA) Convention, Digiata and Criterion co-hosted a private dinner for actuaries and financial services executives, extending our reach into the actuarial community. Read more  

AI in Financial Services with Affinity Initiative: Switching focus to London, Digiata was proud to host an AI seminar with Affinity Initiative, our UK partner since 2025. The discussion was thought-provoking, practical and refreshingly honest about the realities and opportunities of AI in financial services.  

The Monthly Payments Club: As a long-time supporter and attendee, Digiata sponsored the Monthly Payments Club at The Wanderers, bringing the payments community together to connect, talk shop and catch up.  

ACTSA Conference: We continued our long-standing membership of The Association of Corporate Treasurers of South Africa (ACTSA), including exhibiting at this year’s ACTSA conference, where it was great to see so many familiar faces again. We value our partnership with ACTSA as we continue to work with them and the treasury community.  

‍The State of AI Delivery ZA: Digiata was proud to be the prize sponsor of DayOne’s State of AI Delivery ZA 26, South Africa’s first survey of how local teams are actually shipping AI: what’s working, what’s stuck and what it takes. The findings, gathered from practitioners and leaders across the country, are published here: https://dayone.build/state-of-ai-hub.  

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Recognition

Digiata was once again nominated for Most Innovative Supplier of the Year at the Vitality Supplier Awards. The award recognises innovation that has been implemented successfully and delivered meaningful impact, and the nomination reflects our continued focus on practical, high-value innovation within the Vitality ecosystem.  

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Our People

None of this year's milestones would have been possible without our people. Our teams in Johannesburg and Cape Town continued to show up for our clients and for each other, working hard to deliver every day, and this year we welcomed 11 new colleagues to Digiata.  

We also made time to enjoy the journey together. From a hotly contested potjiekos competition and padel matches and pub quizzes, our social calendar kept the team connected and gave us plenty of chances to celebrate our successes along the way.  ‍

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The Digiata Foundation

The Digiata Foundation continues to go from strength to strength, with more of our people getting involved in more projects every year. In 2026, our projects included;  

Building Digital Skills: The Digiata Foundation sponsored a participant in the GirlCode Techpreneur Programme, which equips participants with the technical and business skills to launch sustainable tech ventures.  

Fighting Hunger: On Mandela Day, teams in Johannesburg and Cape Town volunteered with Ladles of Love, packing food parcels and preparing learning material for early childhood development centres. We also collected 27 breakfast bundles for Gift of the Givers. Read more  

Caring for Women and Children: We supported Reach for a Dream on Slipper Day, donated to the Santa Shoebox Project for children in need, and for Women's Month painted and filled tote bags with toiletries for women supported by Straatwerk.

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Looking Ahead to 2027

Digiata enters its next 25 years as an AI-first engineering partner, building enduring financial services systems and taking genuine ownership of client outcomes.  

In 2027, we will put our new tooling to work across more client projects, deepen our presence in the UK insurance market, and keep helping financial services leaders deliver change faster, with the reliability they have always counted on us for.  

“Our goal for the next 25 years is simple. We want to continue being the most trusted partner that you’ve never heard of, ensuring that as the financial world becomes faster and more complex, the foundations remain unshakable.” -  Nemanja Stabic, CEO  

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