Tribe in Singapore: Three months in

So… What’s it actually like opening up a brand new office? And what about life as employee number one in the new location?

A little under three months have passed since Tribe Payments opened up its first office outside of Europe – a new outpost in Singapore – as part of our ongoing strategic expansion, which is being led by Alex Reddish in his new role of Head of Market Expansion & GTM Strategy.

Running the regional Tribe office in Singapore is payments veteran Matt Weir, who serves as Tribe’s GM – Asia Pacific. Here, he shares his story on how his international payments journey led him to Singapore, and why the time is right for Tribe’s strategic expansion into the region. 

The Road to Singapore

I can't quite believe it, but it’s now 18 years since I arrived in Singapore with my growing family, and 20 years since we left the UK. Following roles with JCB and Visa in England, I was offered the chance to head up Visa’s Middle East Merchant Solution team in Dubai back in 2005 and so, with my wife and newborn baby son in tow, we took the plunge - naively thinking we would only be away for a couple of years or so(!) 

A further opportunity arose with Visa in 2007 to lead their Regional Acceptance Solutions Team in Singapore, and I’ve been out here ever since. Working with Visa, and subsequently Euronet, was a fantastic way to learn about both Singapore and the wider region - the varied cultures, histories, great people and of course payments.

The Road to Tribe

Singapore is a great hub to make contacts. It is the centre of payments industry growth across the region, and has strong government support for start-ups and fintechs. This led to opportunities for me to move from the corporate world into the fintech space, giving me great insights and experiences of how big and small companies work.

Fast forward to 2024, and I was introduced to Alex Reddish, after hearing how Tribe was scaling fast and planning on opening a new Singapore office. We had a great first meeting as he took me through the Tribe success story, with its own unique proprietary platform that provides both issuer and acquirer processing - and connectivity to six major card schemes. Alex introduced me to the rest of the Senior Leadership Team, and that was it - what an exciting opportunity!

Tribe enables its customers to have full control over their payments processing, and there is a definite space in the APAC market for the company to make its mark - the proof is already there, as shown with recent partnerships with PhotonPay, to name just one of a number of customers already in the APAC portfolio.

The Asia-Pacific region is home to large, young, and predominantly tech-savvy populations. Digital wallets are everywhere, but there are still huge opportunities to cater for different payment habits and promote financial inclusion, which is where a company like Tribe can really help address this imbalance with its quick-to-market and modular technology. 

The New Office

As mentioned, Singapore is a great place to open a new office – although that didn’t mean that we weren’t in a race against time to get everything ready for an early Q4 launch, ahead of the Singapore Fintech Festival!

It certainly helped that I had been through this before, and therefore aware of some common pitfalls, but I obviously couldn’t have done it without the team at HQ in London, and also Tribe’s wider People Team.

Thankfully, once late October rolled around, we were all set and I couldn’t have wished for a better office launch. We picked up some great PR, my thanks to the Marketing Team for their support, and we were inundated with requests and meetings.

What’s it like (currently) being a one-man office? Well, it’s been non-stop! I’ve been a popular man since we opened in Singapore - as mentioned, Tribe already has a portfolio of customers in Asia-Pacific, this was just the natural next step in terms of both being able to serve them better and empower further organisations with our issuer and acquirer processing.

Sure, Secret Santa may have been a little different – To Matt, From Matt(!) – but I was also fortunate to be visiting family in the UK over Christmas, so managed to join some of the London office’s festivities.

Singapore Fintech Festival

The Festival is a hotbed of payments innovation offering great connectivity and opportunity, and 2024 was no exception. I was joined for the week by Alex (pictured below) and it was great to get in front of multiple new and existing contacts from the payments world – including some of our customers. It really set the tone for the coming months.

And the future…?

What does 2025 hold? Well, without divulging too much, we have been very busy building out our strategic regional plans whilst meeting with multiple partners and prospects to outline the value that Tribe can bring to customers on both the issuing and acquiring sides of the business. We have some exciting key events coming up including the Annual FinTech Summit in Singapore next month and Money20/20 Asia in Bangkok in April - so please let me and the team know if you’re also planning to be at those events.

We’ll also have some exciting announcements coming up in the next few weeks, post the break for the Lunar New Year and, on that note, I’d like to wish all our friends, customers and partners a very happy and prosperous Year of the Snake: Gong Xi Fa Cai!