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 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 UK and Australia. The past twelve years have been spent directly inside Australian payments modernisation — across 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 change at institutional scale.

Program delivery in Australia has included work with Commonwealth Bank, NAB, Woolworths, Coles, and Suncorp, spanning merchant acquiring, real-time payments, and platform transformation. Government and public sector delivery includes NSW Health and Transport for NSW.

Before Australia, Douglas held a senior governance and stability role at Bank of America EMEA in London, operating across the EMEA payments infrastructure alongside institutions including HSBC, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Citi, and Standard Chartered. That 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.

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 that 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