Future of Payments: Insights, Innovation, and Financial Empowerment with Conor Tiernan, Head of Insights at VibePay

In this episode we speak with Conor Tiernan, Head of Insights at VibePay about his WHY, WHAT and HOW when it comes to empowering brands with actionable (banking data led) insights and seamless customer interactions and offering instant A2A payments.

Conor shares how the company is redefining payments through fee-free transactions, personalized customer engagement, and actionable insights. He envisions a future where payments are seamless and data-driven, empowering businesses to thrive in a digital-first economy. Discover how Vibe Pay is shaping tomorrow's financial landscape.

Key Words:

• Payments innovation
• Fee-free transactions
• Open banking
• Financial empowerment
• Real-time data analytics
• Customer engagement
• Insights platform
• Data-driven decision-making
• Personalized experiences
• Future of payments
• AI-driven automation
• Open finance ecosystem

Transcript

Hello and welcome to another episode of Banking on Information. Today I have with me Conor Tiernan, who is Head of Insights at Vibe Pay. Welcome to the podcast, Conor. Hey, great to be here. Now, we're going to start with this very important question. Based on the book by Simon Sinek, start with why. Why, Connor, do you do what you do? So, I mean, why do I do on, I guess, firstly, kind of diving into it, why do I do what I do? I mean, I've always been passionate about solving real-world problems through technology, and actually believe that financial empowerment really helps businesses of all shapes and sizes, whether it's just a freelancer trying to build their own brand, starting up small business, navigating uncertain times that we certainly saw through COVID or even kind of up to enterprise level.

In particular, open banking, which is what VibePay does a lot of, excites me because it turns financial data into a tool for growth rather than it being a barrier. So when I see creators and businesses using the tools that we have to make decisions to fuel their success. It's it's really really exciting to kind of see that, but then at Vipay ourselves, we kicked off on a mission to redefine payments and what payments means, how they can empower businesses, creators, sellers to thrive in what is more and more a digital-first economy these days. And payments historically being complex, expensive, quite impersonal as well. So we saw an opportunity to actually just offer simple, instant, fee-free transactions through lovely shareable links, QR codes, seamless integrations as well.

So it just kind of simplifies the whole process and actually means that businesses get to keep 100% of their earnings, which we kind of see as really powerful. But payments are only the beginning because actually, payments; there's a lot of information that goes with the payment and actually. We've created an insights platform so you can actually dig deeper into the real-time banking data around all the users within the community and then you can actually turn that data into actionable insight, so it's I guess it enables business businesses not to only manage their cash flow but actually more deeply understand their audience. You can identify trends and then actually ultimately uh drive smarter decision making. So I guess that's uh that's a the why, the long why there yeah no so it's a double why.

So your why is that you want to solve real-world problems for people, and by paying you want to reinvent payments or how that's done, which which actually goes quite well together right? That sounds like a real-world problem to solve: how to help businesses make payments and how to do that in a new and innovative way. So that that is great. So what if we we sort of double click a little bit on that? What are the key you use cases that Buy Pay solves for? What do you solve for your customers so I guess we'll start with I'll call out three First to start with is customer engagement. So it can be very stilted and touching back as on earlier, impersonal in terms of kind of how you can engage with a customer.

And we recognize that. And then within our community, we actually created a channels feature. So, actually enabling businesses to interact directly with their audience. So, it's a lovely customizable space. So, it helps foster that loyalty. So, you've still got the brand recognition there, but actually delivering a personalized experience so brands can share updates, brands can send offers, they can engage directly with their users, which we find incredibly powerful. Then, beyond that, number two, payments. So, payments is just an area that we do solve because traditional payment systems are riddled with inefficiencies. I mean, for one, look at high fees. slow settlements because again that the time that actually the the consumer might make the

payments or send you the funds to actually getting it in your in your account and then also the reliance on third party intermediaries so kind of the middlemen that sit in the middle that then take their own cut so again it's like vip actually removes all that and makes it far more seamless and straightforward and then thirdly just kind of almost underpinning both is uh the insights so it's kind of the real-time data analytics so it means that businesses and brands can actually identify kind of macro trends and actually look into spending habits of certain groups of individuals and then design targeted campaigns off the back of that whether that's their own or whether that's actually kind of engaging the vibe community itself so uh there's there's a huge amount of power that data is the the foundation then everything else is kind of built on top of that yep so You help create a personalized experience.

You facilitate the payments without the fees and without the middlemen. And then you leverage the data to create insights for your users. I think those are three great use cases of what you do. And I think they go quite well with the why that you described earlier. Now, when you talk to your customers, how do they describe the value they get from working with you? So again, I'll just kind of zoom in on three areas. So just kind of keep it nice and succinct there. So first would be naturally by way of the payments that we facilitate and that we don't apply any fees, revenue retention. So the customers absolutely, if we look at it from a business perspective, it's

eliminates the fees so it means that they actually retain more of their earnings so if you think of a an influencer or a digital creator they they can actually keep 100 of what they earn they can actually engage their followers their community directly and get payments from them without having any any percentages kind of taken out along the way so actually for for a freelance or a digital seller this is incredibly powerful so it could mean that they i don't know they potentially get an additional 10 15 20 of their revenue um compared to traditional um traditional payment platforms so that that's that's pretty powerful uh the the improved decision making because actually through the through looking into the the data through certainly through vipe insights businesses they can they can really identify Uh, they can analyze the real-time banking data so they can identify trends; they can actually understand how a group of individuals are spending uh, and then segment their audience so that they're actually reaching them in a far more personal way.

Um, so one particular client used insights to actually track a group of customer spending patterns and then actually introduce time-sensitive offers around that. So, I mean, they increased sales by, I don't know, up to 25%. So pretty powerful. And then beyond that, customer loyalty. So actually, it's kind of through these channels, businesses building these stronger relationships. So kind of one-to-one. So personalized communications and offers. So yeah, it kind of brings it all back together. That sense of community and that loyalty kind of drives repeat business. So yeah, customers seem to love it. Yep. So revenue retention. Better decision making based on insights and better experience and better loyalty by the customer. Those are three very valuable ways that you provide value to your customers.

Now, I like to do this thing called futures thinking, which we don't know what the future is going to bring, but we can think about a possible future. So, what I like to do is think 10 years out. So, think 2034. What is the? World, look like and what does the world of payments look like 10 years from now? Can you paint me a picture of what you think a possible future could look like, Connor? I'll do my best. So yeah, in 10 years' time, I think the financial landscape will be fully interconnected; it will be empowered by data it'll be data-driven payments, in essence. I believe they'll almost become invisible, so they'll just be embedded so seamlessly into your your everyday interactions, whether that's maybe through a wearable device or voice commands or actually it's just AI-driven automation.

So you've actually we've moved beyond... well, we're already in the state we've got AI assistants and co-pilots; we're now moving into AI agents. 10 years' time is going to be even further than that. And if we look through the lens of what we call open banking so at the moment it's built on two pillars: one of access to data, the other being able to initiate payments it'll actually have evolved beyond that. So open finance integrating everything from payments, lending, investments, insurance into utilities; it'll just make it into one unified ecosystem. So then, actually, data will become the most valuable currency; and then, actually Businesses don't rely on these real-time insights to deeply understand individuals' preferences, their habits, and then actually kind of surface uh yeah kind of surface really personalized experiences and be able to do that at scale as well.

And yeah I think that ties in uh ties into I guess kind of how Vibepay is positioning ourselves for that future, so it's like okay this data enablement so then actually it's okay we can we're building those tools today that will actually empower businesses in 10 years time. It's kind of this real-time insight into banking transactional data so we're creating. That foundation for uh, for tomorrow, but uh, yeah, it'll be more about interoperability there'll be ever increasing scale of into uh of innovation, uh, and then actually it's like the the fostering of partnerships and in the future as well, I guess. Just the final point is that your your bank will be where you hold your funds, but you won't necessarily interact with your bank.

So actually, it's like you'll hold you hold your money with your bank, but then you'll interact through maybe many, many different providers and suppliers to actually carry out services that you require or need, not just so be that the bank is where you hold Your funds hold your funds at the back, so it'll be interesting to see in that future how banks themselves and financial institutions can actually drive drive better value and outcomes for consumers and users as well. So I guess there's a bit of a gauntlet laid down for them to keep innovating. Yeah, so very, very interesting what you're describing here as a possible future. So data will be very embedded, almost invisible, right, in the background. It will be much more sort of insight-driven.

There might be different like maybe AI agents will be paying for us; we will see more open banking and a much more sort of advanced use of open banking. You mentioned it a little bit, but how are you at vibe bay sort of getting ready for that possible future that you were that you were painting the picture of so we're doing that with this with this insights platform that we've we've built we've created uh because We've already got the community, we've got the app, we've got the payments, but then we've already got all of this data. And then we've created a way for brands, businesses, and a business could be a market intelligence company. It could be a research business.

It could be a PR agency that actually just wants to get deeper insight into the spending trends and habits and then take their own action off the back. So we've created this platform that enables brands and businesses to actually start doing that today with deeply customizable insights, a huge number of layers of data cleaned. The data is clean in the sense that when you get it directly from the bank, it's raw and potentially not that helpful. So we clean that up and we make it into something that is relatable. So this platform is something that we built, created, and it's incredibly exciting; where like this is only almost uh not, yeah, almost like day zero um, and then it'll just be getting in better and better so kind of give it 10 years time-we're already planning for that future with this insights platform.

So it's super exciting! Well, that's a great point to maybe wrap this up. So get ready for the future of payments with ViPay, I would say. So thank you very much, Conor, for being on the podcast today. If you want to find out more about ViPay, you can find Conor on LinkedIn. So thank you very much for being on the podcast. Pleasure. Absolutely loved it. Thanks, Rutger. Thank you. And until next time, choose to be curious.