About
PayCore Partners is an independent practice founded by Douglas Kilburn.
It is not a large firm, and it does not present itself as one. The value it brings is the direct experience and judgment of senior practitioners, each with more than twenty-five years environments where stability and trust are genuinely non-negotiable.
Douglas Kilburn (Doug) Founder, PayCore Partners
Douglas Kilburn is a executive leader based in Sydney.
His career spans retail, banking, fintech, capital markets, enterprise infrastructure, and commerce across EMEA, APAC and Australia. The past twelve+ years have been spent directly inside Australian payments modernisation across issuing and acquiring and the operational and governance challenges that accompany platform stability and change at institutional scale.
Executive delivery in Australia has included work with - CBA, NAB, ANZ, Westpac, Suncorp, Woolworths and Coles, and public sector work with NSW Police, Health and Transport.
Before moving to Australia, Douglas held a senior governance and stability role at Bank of America Merrill Lynch EMEA in London, operating across the payments infrastructure. The role centred on resilience uplift, regulatory remediation, and board-level assurance, and produced measurable improvements in delivery predictability, a significant reduction in platform-related process failures, and the avoidance of material regulatory penalties through structured risk and compliance programs.
Prior to this Douglas began his career consulting at McKinsey and Cap Gemini and financial institutions including HSBC, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Citi, and Standard Chartered.
In 2017, Douglas co-authored a GreySpark Partners research paper; The Payments Landscape in Australia: The Disruption of Innovative Technologies which forecast the structural shifts that would reshape Australian retail payments over the decade that followed. Reading that analysis against what has since unfolded became the catalyst for the 2026 PayCore Partners paper.
His 2026 paper, From Legacy Rails to Real-Time: Payments Then and Now, is a long-form reflection on a decade of transformation what the industry got right, what it consistently underestimated, and what the leadership of major payments programs actually required in practice.
What PayCore Partners does
PayCore Partners works with organisations and individuals navigating complex payments and technology transformation.
Hands-on Interim Executive and Advisory engagements on delivery governance, program sequencing, and operating model design for transformation programs in specialising in payments and transaction banking.
Independent Interim Executive assessment of program delivery health, risk posture, and governance maturity — particularly for programs approaching critical milestones or experiencing delivery stress.
Executive coaching for senior leaders in technology, payments and transformation — including those considering the transition from corporate leadership to independent advisory practice.
Thought leadership through long-form papers, the PayCore Brief newsletter, and direct advisory relationships.
Engagements are tailored to the situation. The starting point is always a direct conversation.
PayCore Partners
"The hardest problems were not primarily technological. They were organisational, structural, and human. That is where the real advisory work sits."
Douglas Kilburn, Digital Transformation Paper "From Legacy Rails to Real-Time, 2026"
© 2026 PayCore Partners. ABN available on request.
Payments · AI & Agentic · Consulting
Sydney, Australia – working across Australasia and Asia-Pacific