Kevin Kilty expected investors to be interested. He had gone through an accelerator, applied under a new regulatory regime and found a gap in the UAE’s payments market. Surely someone would want to back it. His recollection of the response is considerably less festive: “They were the only ones who backed us.” The investors who did say yes were at Signal Peak Ventures in Salt Lake City. A company built to move money across borders had first needed a little conviction to cross one.
There is a useful clue to Kilty in that admission. He tells the story with the disappointing part left in. Hubpay’s history contains a licence, an app, a substantial funding round and an expanding business. It also contains waiting. Waiting for banking partners, waiting for technical connections, waiting for the outside world to make the inside plan possible. A founder can choose a launch date. The rest of the financial system has its own diary.
A history student goes looking for a different kind of work
Kilty was born in Dublin and moved with his family when he was young, growing up near London. He studied history at the University of York between 2004 and 2007. His dissertation concerned the Troubles. Economic development after conflict interested him: how opportunity might help make peace worth preserving. That is an unusually long view to bring to a business eventually concerned with the speed of a payment.
Banking came first. His career included RBS and a vice-president role at Mizuho. Alongside that world, he worked with Opportunity International, the microfinance organisation. The contrast matters to the shape of his career. Finance could be considered from the institution’s side of the desk, with its transactions and processes, or from the position of someone trying to gain access to it. Kilty had reasons to think about both.
He travelled in Palestine and Libya and wanted to join an impact investment fund in the wider region. Dubai was a place to look for that work. Founding a payments company was a later possibility. The eventual business grew out of an observation he made while there: the fintech services he expected to see were missing. A career move had turned into a market question.
The distinction is revealing. His original interest was in what finance could make possible. The practical problem he found was how to get money from one place to another. Grand ambitions often arrive wearing quite ordinary clothes. In this case, the clothes included an account application and a foreign-exchange transaction.
Permission first. Customers next.
Hubpay was founded in 2019. It secured its full UAE licence in 2020 and launched its retail platform in January 2021. The first offering concentrated on remittances, allowing people in the UAE to send money abroad. Kilty’s starting point was recognisable: a service resembling the early TransferWise proposition, adapted to a region where he saw room for a different approach.
His own regulatory record supplies a precise milestone. Kevin John Kilty became Hubpay Limited’s Senior Executive Officer on 7 September 2020. Behind the founder title sat a defined responsibility within a regulated financial business. Permission was part of the product’s construction. Before anyone could admire the interface, there had to be an organisation authorised to do the work.
For a customer, the licence is rarely the exciting part of the transaction. The exciting part is that money arrives where it should. For the person building the service, those two things belong in the same sentence. The machinery that looks tedious from the outside is what allows a promise on a screen to become a payment somewhere else.
In February 2022, Hubpay announced a $20 million Series A, led by Signal Peak Ventures, with Olive Tree Capital and BECO Capital participating alongside earlier backers. The stated uses were hiring and international expansion, particularly in Asia and Africa. It was a substantial vote of confidence in a young company. Confidence, however, could finance work; it could not instantly supply every connection the work required.
The long interval between possible and practical
By Kilty’s later account, the company had been early. Retail remittances were followed by a move towards business payments, but the broader service needed infrastructure that was still developing. In the period he described from 2023 through the end of 2024, annual recurring revenue sat around $1 million to $2 million. The idea had customers. The business was still waiting for capabilities that would let it do more.
That interval deserves room in the story. It is easy to draw a timeline whose dates march politely towards growth. Living through the space between them is a different exercise. A payment platform depends on other institutions being ready to connect, accept and settle. Its ambitions are only partly under its own roof. Every missing dependency can become a customer promise that has to wait.
There is an awkward arithmetic to being early. You keep paying for the team while the market takes its time. The same conviction that got the business started then has to survive a less glamorous test: whether the next period of work brings enough progress to justify the one after it. Hubpay’s later growth makes the wait easier to narrate. It does not make the wait disappear.
“I think our core mission remains the same.”
Kevin Kilty, March 2024
The small dignity of an account in your own name
In March 2024, Kilty explained a change that sounds modest until you consider it from a customer’s side. Hubpay’s international partnerships allowed it to offer virtual IBANs, giving a business an account in its own name. Previously, transactions passed through a Hubpay client-money account. The development meant a customer could have a named account across multiple currencies.
An IBAN makes a poor dinner-party anecdote. It also makes a useful business tool. For an enterprise trying to receive money internationally, having an account number associated with its own name is a concrete change in how it can operate. The payment industry’s language tends to disguise these conveniences in abbreviations. Kilty’s explanation returned the abbreviation to the business using it.
The move towards corporate customers also changed the map. Hubpay’s Africa Collect & Remit offering, announced in October 2023, addressed payments into the UAE from businesses with African entities or trading partners. Kilty discussed that expansion alongside chief operating officer Maia Van Paridon. The company’s subject had widened from money sent home to money moving through trade.
- Get an accountA business needs a way to receive money.
- Work across currenciesCustomers and suppliers may use different money.
- Make the paymentThe transaction has to reach its destination.
A banker’s taste for unromantic foundations
By September 2025, Kilty was describing Hubpay as an integrated platform for UAE businesses, extending from account opening to international operations. He put regulation at the centre of the proposition and said business onboarding could take as little as one business day. The promise was specific enough to be useful: reduce the time between forming a company and being able to transact.
His advice to other founders in regulated sectors had a suitably sober finish: “The ‘move fast and break things’ mantra does not apply”. It is an appealing line precisely because it removes a fashionable permission slip. Payments require a form of progress that customers can rely on. A clever shortcut is less attractive when someone else’s money is travelling along it.
This is also where his background becomes legible. He approaches technology with an interest in the financial architecture around it. The account, the banking relationship, the approval and the transaction all belong to the same service. The founder’s job is to make those pieces work together, including the pieces that will never appear in a launch photograph.
When the calendar finally moved
Looking back at 2025, Kilty reported that Hubpay’s revenue had grown more than fivefold. He credited capabilities becoming available domestically and internationally, allowing the company to release more of its own product stack. He also credited Daniel Blackhurst and his team for AI-assisted onboarding and described Hubpay Connect, its payments-as-a-service offering, as live. The progress had a cast of people and a set of dependencies.
Kilty’s year-end account of Hubpay’s performance. Revenue growth, not a valuation or a profit figure.
His plans for 2026 included new markets and building a twin campus across London and Abu Dhabi. Those are ambitions with a date attached, rather than completed destinations. They suggest how far the project has travelled from its retail starting point. Hubpay now describes a team of more than 60 employees, representing more than 20 nationalities, across five office locations in the UAE, UK, Pakistan and Egypt.
The person beyond the payment
There are other glimpses of Kilty outside the company’s operating diagram. He has spoken about ice climbing in Switzerland. He belongs to the OPUS founder community and joined its delegation to Jordan in 2025. The trip included Wadi Rum and Petra, where footage was captured for the documentary DREAMERS. Even a founder whose work concerns connections needs reasons to leave the laptop.
One connection predates the business altogether. Cameron Shaw says he and Kilty met on their first day at university. Years later, Kilty acted as master of ceremonies at Shaw’s wedding; later still, they were interviewed alongside one another for DREAMERS. It is a pleasingly ordinary strand through a story full of licences and international payments. Before either man had a founder biography, they had a first day.
Kilty’s career has moved between countries, institutions and versions of the same ambition: make finance more accessible and useful. Hubpay gives that ambition a daily test. Someone needs an account. Someone needs to pay a supplier. Someone needs money to reach another country. The work is measured in whether those things happen. After the long wait for the plumbing, there is still the business of keeping it running.