Experienced veteran Gary Prince joins Vibe Pay

Lancaster-based Vibe Pay has appointed former city trader and mobile payments specialist Gary Prince as managing director.

Vibe Pay is a payment platform offering direct-to-bank payments to people and businesses. The organisation was founded in early 2018 when changes to open banking legislation allowed regulated businesses to access UK banks’ payments infrastructure.

The company was established by Luke Massie, the entrepreneur behind Vibe Tickets.

Gary has 20 years of experience in the industry working on significant projects with the likes of Barclays, O2, Vodafone, BT, VocaLink and CostaExpress.

In his new role Vibe Pay, he will spearhead the firm’s mission to make payments simple while offering a guarantee of no fees to its customers.

He said: “I’ve never settled for the status quo. In 2005 when a big employer told me there was no future in mobile, I knew it was time for me to move on. I have to be moving forward and making progress and I’ve never done that at such a pace as I have at Vibe Pay.

“I live and breathe all things payment and my focus is always on the customer’s perspective. The big players are just not geared up to give consumers what they want. Making a payment is secondary – nobody wakes up thinking they want to make payments but they do want to pay for their travel or their fuel and buy a coffee in the simplest and safest way possible.

“That’s what Vibe Pay is about. We don’t shroud things in complicated tech speak or banking jargon – traditional banks do that to try to justify their snail’s pace and to disguise their lack of innovation. We just listen to customers, feedback into our engineering team and we make things happen quickly.”

Luke Massie added: “We’ve grown Vibe Tickets into a main contender for fans to buy and sell tickets and we listened to our customers when we integrated a third-party payments provider to complete the transactions. It was a hassle and it cost them money. It went against everything the Vibe Group stands for. We had no choice but to create our own alternative. “The changes to open banking legislation, my initial meetings with Gary and the immediate interest from some of the country’s best payments industry techies in what we were doing showed we’d hit on something at the right time. The payments market is ripe for disruption. It’s stuck in the dark ages when customers couldn’t choose, they made do with what they were offered. Vibe Pay is revolutionary in that respect.”