About
PayCore Partners is an independent advisory 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 inside payments, transaction banking, and financial infrastructure in environments where stability and trust are genuinely non-negotiable.
Douglas Kilburn (Doug) Founder, PayCore Partners
Douglas Kilburn is a payments, product and transformation leader based in Sydney.
His career spans retail banking, fintech, capital markets infrastructure, and payments advisory across the EMEA, APAC and Australia. The past twelve+ years have been spent directly inside Australian payments modernisation across issuing and acquiring: real-time A2A rails, NPP, Direct Entry, ISO 20022 adoption, card-present and e-commerce merchant acquiring, and the operational and governance challenges that accompany platform stability and change at institutional scale.
Program delivery in Australia has included work with CBA, NAB, ANZ, Suncorp, Woolworths and Coles in Australia and Bank of America Merrill Lynch, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Citi, and Standard Chartered across EMEA and government and public sector delivery with NSW Health and Transport for NSW.
Before 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 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.
Advisory engagement on delivery governance, program sequencing, and operating model design for transformation programs in payments and transaction banking.
Independent 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 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, From Legacy Rails to Real-Time, 2026