Becoming the payment partner for tomorrow: Interview with Alex Reddish, Managing Director at Tribe

By Gaia Lamperti

A “tribe” is a group of people moving towards the same goal, and that’s what payments technology company Tribe also aspires to: representing the power of expert people working in the payments sphere, not just to deliver services and orchestrate them but also build a business culture around them.

That is what Alex Reddish, Tribe’s Managing Director, told IBS Intelligence in a recent interview discussing the company’s journey to scaling up, international expansion and foraying into new verticals.

Could you trace the journey of Tribe to scaling up the business, and all the new opportunities and challenges that came with that? 

The idea behind Tribe was that a group of us had embraced and enjoyed FinTech 1.0, if we can call it that way, and we were very excited about the new consumers’ expectations around UX/UI, data centricity and real-time convenient payments, which meant that financial services had taken a huge leap forward. But we felt that the infrastructure underneath hadn’t necessarily maintained pace and, you know, your house is only as good as the foundations on which it is built. We wanted to create the ability for people to construct even more. And in the FinTech 2.0 era where we are now, we are seeing that through the proliferation of companies that provide more complex services and API-led data technology, ultimately, to the benefit of the end-user. 

The other aspect that we have always been very cognizant of is that technology is very easily commoditized. So, for us, it was always about delivering the end-to-end experience for our customers rather than the piece of software, and we took that into our DNA, building from the customer up as opposed to the client down and that’s reflected in some of the newer functionality that we brought to market. These days it’s not just about the delivery of a payment account, there’s so much more that’s required for a customer to be happy. We want to be that payment partner for tomorrow, rather than just today. 

To deliver that sort of experience Tribe has traditionally embraced a collaborative approach. Why do you think that partnering up with other FinTech is the right way forward? 

Tribe is an orchestration layer that provides underlying technology, and it maintains a focus on building the best-in-class software. I think, therefore, in order to provide the holistic end to end solution, we needed to partner. We need to marry good technology with good other regulated businesses and a good end-product. Therefore, we wanted to achieve a collective group of expert people or businesses that want to deliver better products and orchestrate them.

When you break down what payments look like today, it’s not just a 16-digit card number. Now there’s a lot of focus on real-time payments, fraud management, open banking, and the ability to move data between financial institutions, so we have to be cognizant of becoming very good at what we do and not trying to be a master of none. 

Working with the likes of ClearBank or Currencycloud allows us to deliver a real-time, competitively priced, perfect solution. Tribe has 22 channel partners in total, we’re a big believer in the ecosystem as we think that, fundamentally, that’s how FinTech was born and it’s how FinTech maintains its pace and we just want to continue to support our customers by delivering the holistically best product as possible. 

Now that we have spoken about the people side, let’s get into the tech. What are some of Tribe’s recently added functionalities? 

Our acquiring processing has grown at an extremely fast rate over the past 12 months, as we’ve seen the impact of Covid on digitalisation and how people look at controlling more of the value chain themselves. 

Out of the latest things that we’ve built, we’re extremely focused on data, more recently Tribe has put into place Secure MPI and ACS authentication products and we’ve really started to accelerate the acceptance elements of our business as we recognise the opportunity that was laid before us. Also, we believe we have a very good product set and that building an ability to win large scale crypto clients is becoming extremely important. 

In terms of what’s coming down the line, there’s an insights platform that will offer customers the ability to really understand the value that Tribe brings in. Obviously, the other thing that we have our eyes on is international expansion and where that may take us over the next six months. 

Could you expand on Tribe’s new interest in the crypto vertical?  

Obviously, our partners are sort of our first foray into crypto in terms of delivery of fiat to crypto on off-ramps and it’s something that we’re proud of. 

But I think what we’re now seeing is a number of other exchanges and crypto businesses looking to Tribe based on the level of technology and integration processes, so we would like to be in a place where we represent a large number of the crypto exchanges in the world. 

What we see is that crypto is not just an asset class that is there for appreciation and depreciation, there are now applicable use cases and the democratisation of those assets truly has a purpose in life. This is not just going away but it will become an integral part of society. For Tribe, there is a chance to continue to understand the opportunity and make sure we are well-positioned for the future. 

With the expansion of the company in areas such as data and crypto it comes naturally to think about the security aspect. How are you going to concentrate your effort on that?  

We are very open to both regulation and security as a whole, it is a critical part of the ecosystem. Payments processors, as infrastructure providers, present a critical outsourcing risk. We have therefore kind of embraced security. We’re due to complete our ISO 9001 and 27001 in June, so we’re taking it extremely seriously. We’d like to follow that on with several security certifications at the back end of this year, and we’ve made commitments to our customers.  

We can ultimately choose to become more focused and more accepting of regulation as opposed to retrospectively applying it, and I think that’s allowed us to embrace the opportunity of professionalising our business plan earlier and we adopt the same principles while we focus on diversity and carbon neutrality, all of these core principles are foundational cultures for us.  

Tribe’s point of view has always been that of ‘looking at tomorrow’s opportunities’, so what are some of the other areas the company will be looking at in the near future to drive innovation?  

We’ve made some commitments to our team to start putting a portion of revenue into R&D, so now we are super keen to develop and understand new functionalities in terms of how blockchain, transparency, and reputability make a difference to payment processing. This comes back to that cultural principle of ensuring that innovation is a stable part of our journey. 

We also continue to do a horizon scan, in the next three to five years Tribe will probably be very well positioned in its access to real-time payments, access to open banking and will continue the development of its current scheme-based products. 

As a business, we are not afraid to invest in what we believe in, and I think that it will continue to be the case. We’ll also continue to come back to the customer to effectively deliver a data-centric, hyper-personalised experience. 

And while we are going through the fragmentation of FinTech and consumer banking I still think that we have a way to go. FinTech is nowhere near finished and definitely nowhere near fragmented enough to deliver true consumer value.