Ep. 153 - The Human Side of Payments: Leadership, Inclusion & Customer Success, with Tribe

Joanne Lawrence (0:00)

It's not always taking the positive signs that you have a good working relationship to mean that everything is as it should be. To me, that's normally a red flag in the sense of if you aren't having difficult conversations. Sometimes politeness is misinterpreted as we're good, until it's not. Understand what the need and the pain is, and then describe what the solution is. Rather than being so hung up on the Harvey Balls, the tick box exercises, ultimately for Tribe, if our customers grow, we grow. And sometimes it's even asking a customer questions they haven't asked themselves. I remember a day when a customer of mine said, I want 200 alternative payment methods, and they were deadly serious when they said it. I need the data to be able to come up with something. If there are already biases built into that, does that bias amplify as well? How do you use it as a tool? How do you be mindful and conscious of the biases, finding the balance between scale, the scalability, but also that you will always need human intervention.

Liam Gray (0:58)

Welcome back to The Payments Shed. I'm Liam Gray, joined as always by my co-host, Justin Hanna, and today we're joined by Joanne Lawrence, Head of Customer Success Services at Tribe Payments, one of the most respected voices in the industry. Jo, welcome to the show. Tell us a little bit more about you and the business.

Joanne Lawrence (1:16)

Yeah, so it's pleasure to be here. As you mentioned, Joanne is typically the name that I'm known by in the industry. I do go by Jo, which is sometimes confusing in different places, in different regions. So yeah, Jo Lawrence, I head up Customer Success Services for Tribe Payments. Tribe Payments, for those that don't know who we are, we're actually a processor for issuing and acquiring. We, Tribe Payments, are predominantly UK and Europe. We originated out of Kaunas in Lithuania. We also have a Moldovan office. We have a London headquarters. Circa 18 months or so ago, we also established our Asia Pacific headquarters as well. We already had customers out there from actually cross border, etc., but then that was really a landing space that we went into. Then just about a year or so ago, we also added the UAE.

Still predominantly, we're circa 220 people.

A large portion of that are based in Lithuania. We actually originated from being a technical-based house, if you like. We are predominantly engineering developers, integrators, and then on top of that, we've actually built the commercial team around it, marketing and so on and so forth. Yes, that's me.

Liam Gray (2:36)

Okay, and we're going to dig into Tribe Payments in particular, later on in the conversation. But what I'm really keen to understand as we kick this off is more about you. Jo, the person behind this whole Tribe Payments head of customer services, how did you get into the space and what's your story?

Joanne Lawrence (2:55)

Yeah, so I didn't plan to be in payments.

Probably standard to most UK people of my age, I will say. So at school kind of did relatively well. I would class myself as somebody that actually was more of an introvert, quite shy, quite nerd like I will say. I know that's not always a trendy word. But I love to kind of read. I love storytelling. Something I was very good at was taking a kind of a piece of information and then being able to tell a story around it. So without even reading the book for my English literature exam, I read the back of it and I still managed to get a B at GCSE by the storytelling that I can do once I've got a narrative. Did go into higher education, got bored. That sounds really bad, but because there wasn't the structure that was there with school of where you're actually forced to go day in, day out. I missed the excitement and decided that I wanted to then be in the world of employment. I actually left higher education six months in and found myself working for a logistics company in account management, which I had never done before. It was just a job that had come up. It was a possibility of earning money. It sounded interesting, so it's actually book publishing and logistics. That it was a managing accounts, so it's book ordering. Then I went into logistics, even looking at the path of delivery logistics, of a distribution for a supermarket food chain. Again, at that point, I didn't realize, but it was always about communication and always about relationships and building them. That's where again, not everyone can speak to drivers and actually relate to them a map. I didn't like geography, but what I did like was talking and being able to understand who it was that I was talking to, and be able to reflect what their needs were, or how I needed to adjust my tone or anything like that. I then at a very early age got pregnant, so I was 19