Hubpay

For a small company in Dubai importing textiles from Karachi and selling to a buyer in Lagos, money has always been the slowest part of the deal. The goods move in days. The payment moves in weeks - through correspondent banks, wire fees, and exchange rates set by someone else. Hubpay was built on the premise that this gap is not a fact of life but a product problem, and that the businesses caught inside it are large enough to matter and small enough to be ignored.

Founded in 2019 by Kevin Kilty and licensed the following year under the Abu Dhabi Global Market, Hubpay was the first independently regulated fintech in the UAE authorized to offer digital money services. That distinction is not a marketing line - it is the company's strategy. Where many startups moved fast on thin licenses, Hubpay chose the slower path of full regulation, betting that in payments, trust is the thing customers pay for.

The company began as an e-wallet for sending money home and grew into something closer to a treasury desk in an app: multi-currency accounts, corporate foreign exchange, cross-border payroll, and regulated payment acceptance. Its customers are the small and medium-sized businesses that make up the connective tissue of Gulf trade - importers, exporters, agencies, and firms paying staff in a dozen countries.

Hubpay sits at the intersection of two categories that rarely used to overlap: banking-style accounts and software. Its revenue does not come from a single subscription line but from the flow of money itself. The margin on currency conversion is the anchor - every time a business turns dirhams into dollars or rupees, Hubpay earns a slice of the spread, offered at rates it argues are sharper than a traditional bank's. Around that sit transaction and transfer fees, payment-acceptance fees on its payment links, and processing charges on payroll and remittance runs. The accounts themselves carry no minimum balance and come in tiers, which lowers the barrier for a young company to open the door and start moving money.

The customers are deliberately unglamorous, and that is the point. They are the trading companies, agencies, e-commerce sellers and service firms that keep Gulf commerce running - too small for a corporate banking relationship manager, too complex for a consumer app. A textile importer paying suppliers in Pakistan, a marketing agency in Dubai billing clients in London, a logistics firm settling drivers across three countries: these are the businesses that feel the friction of cross-border money most acutely, and they are the ones Hubpay was designed around. The company reports serving businesses from startups to larger enterprises, and it has built onboarding to be fast rather than a gatekeeper.

There is a design philosophy buried in the product line. Each new feature - accounts in 2024, payroll and payment links in 2025 - closes another tab a business owner would otherwise keep open. The bet is that switching between a bank, a payroll vendor and a card processor is where both money and hours leak, and that a single regulated platform can capture the whole flow. It is a familiar fintech strategy, but Hubpay's version is anchored to a specific region rather than a global everywhere.

Kevin Kilty did not arrive from the startup world. Before Hubpay he spent years as a vice president at Mizuho, one of Japan's largest banks, and consulted for Opportunity International, a microfinance NGO - a résumé that pairs the machinery of institutional finance with the problem of reaching people the machinery ignores. That combination shows up in the company he built: regulated like a bank, aimed at the underserved like a development project.

Around him sits a leadership bench drawn from finance, risk and engineering, and a team of more than sixty people spanning over twenty nationalities across five offices in the UAE, the UK, Pakistan and Egypt. The geography is not decoration. Payment corridors are local on both ends - you cannot move money reliably between two countries without understanding the rules, banks and behaviour of each - and Hubpay's footprint mirrors the routes it serves. Its ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification and its stack of licenses are the less visible half of the expertise: in payments, the compliance work is the product as much as the app is.

Global players like Wise, Airwallex, Payoneer and Nium serve cross-border businesses worldwide, and traditional UAE banks offer business accounts and FX. Hubpay's wedge is regional depth over global breadth: it is licensed and built inside the UAE, tuned to the specific corridors linking the Emirates with South Asia, Africa and Europe, and holds regulatory licenses on both ends of routes that global platforms often only touch on one side.