London-based card acquirer MADFIN Tech has teamed up with Tribe Payments to underpin its UK merchant-acquiring rollout, using Tribe’s processing stack and 3D Secure tools as it builds out operations.
The collaboration, reported on 9 September 2026, is designed to give the young firm a production-ready backbone for authorisation, clearing, fraud controls and card-scheme compliance.
MADFIN was set up in late 2024 by payments specialists Irina Litvinova and Kristina Sestaka.
The founders framed the company as a response to familiar industry bottlenecks: lengthy merchant onboarding, scattered compliance work and uneven support after go-live.
The firm operates as an FCA-authorised electronic money institution and positions card acquiring as its core product for businesses of different sizes.
Partnering with an established processor was treated as a first-order decision rather than a later add-on, because the team wanted infrastructure that could scale while remaining tightly aligned with scheme rules from day one.
Tribe Payments, a processor focused on issuer and acquirer technology, is supplying Processing Centre services together with Merchant Plug-In (MPI) software used in 3D Secure authentication.
That combination covers the path from transaction approval through settlement, while helping MADFIN meet Visa and Mastercard requirements and reduce fraud risk on card-not-present payments.
MADFIN Director Kristina Sestaka said the firm set out to construct an acquiring business around robust rails, scheme knowledge and a practical emphasis on trust, regulatory discipline and merchant care.
Tribe, she added, stood out for its Visa and Mastercard experience and for a methodical approach to onboarding and delivery.
She also described Tribe’s staff as responsive and technically fluent, saying that support has mattered as MADFIN expands across the UK.
Speed to market has been one early result.
Mastercard connectivity was completed in less than two months, with Visa onboarding following later in the same year—an unusually compressed timetable for a newly formed acquirer.
After launch, MADFIN reported that volumes running through Tribe’s platform have risen by about 20 percent on average each month.
Robin Anderson, Head of Product at Tribe Payments, described MADFIN as part of a newer cohort of acquirers that treat compliance, merchant experience and operational resilience as design requirements rather than afterthoughts.
He said Tribe is pleased to supply scalable processing and 3D Secure capabilities and expects the relationship to deepen as volumes grow.Both sides have already flagged further work.
MADFIN is examining wallet integrations such as Apple Pay and Google Pay via Tribe’s platform, which would widen the acceptance methods available to merchants without forcing the acquirer to rebuild core rails.
The deal sits in a crowded UK payments market where new acquirers must combine regulatory standing with technical reliability if they want to compete with incumbents.
For MADFIN, the Tribe link is a way to keep product development focused on merchant experience while outsourcing the heavy lifting of scheme connectivity and authentication.
For Tribe, it adds another independent acquirer to a book of banks and fintechs that use the same modular processing environment. If monthly volume growth holds and wallet integrations land as planned, the partnership could become a template for other early-stage UK acquirers that need scheme access without building a processor from scratch.
