Tribe Payments Ltd

Company History

Tribe Payments Ltd was founded in 2018 in London with the goal of overcoming the inflexibility of legacy payment processors. The company quickly established itself as a cloud-native alternative, offering a modular API-led platform that allows clients to pick and choose components rather than adopting a monolithic system. Within a few years, Tribe achieved direct principal membership with all major card schemes—a feat rarely accomplished by European processors—and began scaling its client base and revenue.

Products and Architecture

Tribe’s core offering is the Tribe Core Platform, a unified cloud-native payment processing engine that handles both issuer and acquirer transactions via modular APIs. On the issuing side, it enables full lifecycle card issuing (physical and virtual), tokenisation (MDES/VTS), digital wallet provisioning for Apple Pay and Google Pay, and real-time transaction control. On the acquiring side, it provides a payment gateway, POS/SoftPOS solutions, and end-to-end acquiring processing. Additional products include Risk Monitor (real-time fraud detection with custom rules and machine learning), a white-label Digital Wallet, Open Banking APIs for PSD2-compliant connectivity, Bank Connect for real-time account-to-account payments, a proprietary 3D Secure authentication service, and POS/SoftPOS solutions. All components are independently deployable, allowing customers to integrate only what they need without a full platform migration.

Market Position and Awards

Tribe positions itself as a digital payments and infrastructure orchestrator, competing with traditional processors and other cloud-native platforms. It holds PCI DSS Level 1 and ISO 27001 certifications and maintains direct scheme certifications with Visa, Mastercard, and American Express. The company has forged strategic partnerships, including with Finmo for B2B cross-border payments and Ribbon as its payments processing partner. Tribe has won multiple industry awards, notably Payment Technology Provider of the Year at the 2024 and 2025 Payments Awards. Its client base exceeds 65 institutions, and revenue grew 73% from 2022 to 2023.

Leadership and Growth

Tribe is privately held and has been scaling its leadership team with recent C-suite appointments. In June 2024, Andrew Hocking, previously Chief Strategy Officer, was appointed CEO. Lynda Clarke serves as COO, Vytautas Mickevicius as CTO, and Guy Houghton as CRO. The founders, Suresh Vaghjiani and Wael Almaree, are not currently in C-suite roles, and their present involvement is not publicly confirmed. The company employs 201–500 people and continues to expand its commercial, technology, and operational functions.