Tribe Payments has entered a year-long partnership with the European Women Payments Network (EWPN), a pan-European not-for-profit representing women across payments, fintech and financial services. The arrangement includes Silver sponsorship of EWPN’s 2026 Annual Conference, scheduled for 2 and 3 November, and dedicated support for the network’s growing community in Lithuania.
The Lithuanian thread is the more operationally grounded part of the deal. Rūta Kairytė, Tribe’s commercial director for Northern Europe, was appointed EWPN Country Ambassador for Lithuania earlier this year and has already hosted the country’s first EWPN meet-up at Tribe’s Kaunas office. The Kaunas hub is Tribe’s largest office and engineering base, with more than 150 employees. Kairytė has over 15 years of experience in fintech and payments, including more than nine years at Tribe, where she has held roles spanning managing director of the Lithuanian operation, head of product delivery, and her current commercial brief across the Baltics and Nordics.
Kairytė said Lithuania’s payments sector has built a strong international standing, but that female representation still drops sharply at executive level. “We still see the numbers fall away as you move into executive positions and roles with real decision-making power,” she said. “Women also need access to the networks, opportunities and experience that help them move into positions of influence.”
The numbers behind the initiative
The European Institute for Gender Equality’s 2025 Gender Equality Index found that women hold 28% of board positions at Lithuania’s largest listed companies, up three percentage points since 2023 but still short of three in ten seats. That figure provides the structural backdrop for the EWPN’s community-building work in the country, which Kairytė said will focus on practical conversations: pay negotiation, stepping into leadership roles, and returning to work after parental leave.
Blayne Pereira, head of marketing at Tribe Payments, framed the corporate partnership in terms of broader inclusion, citing EWPN’s track record of platforming causes beyond gender, including disability inclusion through Project Nemo at its 2024 conference.
Market context
Corporate sponsorship of diversity networks in financial services has become a standard part of employer-brand strategy at paytech and banking firms. What distinguishes the Tribe arrangement is its regional specificity. Lithuania has emerged over the past decade as one of Europe’s more active fintech licensing hubs, partly through the Bank of Lithuania‘s relatively accessible regulatory framework, which attracted a cluster of e-money and payment institution licence holders following the post-Brexit redistribution of EU passporting. That concentration of activity makes representation at senior level a more pointed question: if a jurisdiction is marketing itself as a fintech centre, the composition of its decision-making layer matters to the talent pipeline.
Tribe describes itself as Europe’s only processor with simultaneous connectivity to Mastercard, Visa, American Express, UnionPay International, Discover and JCB through a single integration, a claim it uses to position its platform as a consolidation point for issuers and acquirers operating across card schemes. The Kaunas office’s scale suggests the company has a material stake in Lithuania’s talent market, which gives the EWPN partnership a commercial rationale alongside the stated inclusion goals.
Nadia Edwards-Dashti, executive board member of EWPN, said the partnership would help build connections between Lithuania’s payments community and the broader European network. The next visible milestone will be the EWPN Annual Conference in November, where Tribe’s Silver sponsorship will be activated.
The post Tribe Payments Joins EWPN to Back Women’s Progression in Paytech appeared first on The Fintech Times.
