LONDON, UK / ACCESS Newswire / August 26, 2026 / In payments, technology is rarely the hardest part. The real challenge is building infrastructure that businesses can trust when money is moving across borders, regulations are changing and customers expect transactions to be immediate.
For Cardaq Limited, that challenge has shaped the company since the business was first established in London in 2011.
Today, Cardaq operates as a UK-authorised Electronic Money Institution (FRN 900088), providing payment accounts, payment transactions, money movement, FX services, card issuing and acquiring solutions. The company is also a Principal Member of Visa, Mastercard and China UnionPay, giving it a position within the payments ecosystem that goes beyond that of a typical fintech intermediary.
But the company’s current position does not tell the whole story.
A second life for an established company
The company behind Cardaq was established in London in 2011. Its more significant transformation came several years later, when Hugo Remi took control of the business and rebuilt it as Cardaq.
In 2018, he acquired the company and began rebuilding it around technology, regulatory capability and a broader vision for payment infrastructure.
That history matters because Cardaq’s story is not simply one of another fintech startup appearing in an already crowded market.
It is a story about taking an existing payments business and attempting to rebuild it for a market in which the boundaries between financial institutions, technology companies and payment platforms are becoming increasingly difficult to define.
Hugo’s background also helps explain the company’s emphasis on infrastructure. Before taking control of Cardaq, he worked across fintech, e-commerce, compliance and payments, including roles at Latvian Post Bank and as CEO at Fondy. His approach has been shaped by both technology and the practical realities of financial regulation.
Moving closer to the payment rails
One of Cardaq’s most important milestones was becoming a Principal Member of Visa and Mastercard, alongside its Principal Membership with China UnionPay.
Most fintechs issuing cards do so as an agent or programme manager, working under a sponsor bank’s scheme licence. Principal membership removes that layer: Cardaq holds its own direct relationship with the schemes, can sponsor its own BIN ranges, takes on the associated scheme risk and compliance obligations directly.
Cardaq’s journey to Visa principal membership involved a lengthy licensing process that began several years before the company ultimately obtained its status – the kind of scheme due diligence, capital and governance requirements that filter out most smaller players.
That distinction matters most in Cardaq’s target market. The company focuses on card issuing and acquiring for businesses operating in low- and medium-risk sectors, offering both traditional and premium card products alongside infrastructure that lets businesses design payment products around their own requirements.
In other words, Cardaq is positioning itself not simply as a company that processes a payment, but as infrastructure that other businesses can build payment products on top of.
The less visible side of payments
A major part of Cardaq’s development has been investment in the operational layer that sits behind the payment itself – automating tasks and giving the business greater visibility into its own financial activity as it has scaled.
That focus extends to the less visible side of payments: reconciling transactions accurately, reporting to card schemes and regulators, managing settlement information and understanding the economics of individual transactions.
It is an area that receives considerably less attention than the consumer-facing side of fintech, but it is increasingly important.
For a growing payments institution, getting this right can be just as important as the payment interface customers see.
The less visible the infrastructure is to the end user, the more important it becomes that it works.
Payments are becoming a regulatory technology problem
Cardaq’s development also reflects a broader change in financial services.
Payments companies today operate at the intersection of technology, regulation, fraud prevention and customer experience. Improving one area without considering the others can create problems elsewhere.
Hugo Remi has increasingly participated in discussions around these issues through industry organisations and events, including as a board member of the Innovative Payments Association, where Cardaq’s international payments experience has been brought into wider discussions around the future of the sector.
More recently, Remi has spoken publicly about fraud prevention, regulation and the need for closer cooperation between financial institutions and regulators. Cardaq has also been involved in discussions around cross-border payments and the changing regulatory environment.
This is perhaps where Cardaq’s positioning becomes most interesting.
For a Principal Member, this isn’t an abstract balance to strike – Cardaq carries the scheme risk and compliance obligations directly, rather than passing them to a sponsor bank. Fraud controls, onboarding checks and transaction monitoring sit on Cardaq’s own side of the ledger, which is one reason the company frames its regulatory and technology work as a single function rather than two competing priorities.
A broader leadership team
Cardaq’s next phase is also being shaped by changes in its leadership structure.
In 2025, Noyan Nihat joined the company as Co-CEO and Executive Director alongside Hugo Remi. Nihat brought more than two decades of experience across banking and electronic money institutions, adding a different layer of financial-services experience to the leadership team. He has since been elected Deputy Chair of The Payments Association’s Advisory Board.
Claire Huddleston-Stevens joined Cardaq as Chief Operating Officer, bringing experience from roles including Global Processing Services (now Thredd), Clear Junction and SaaScada, with responsibility for completing Cardaq’s priority product launches and building the scalable processes that support the company’s growth.
These appointments are significant because they suggest a company moving from founder-led transformation toward a broader institutional phase.
That transition is often one of the most difficult stages for a growing fintech. Building a product is one challenge. Building an organisation capable of operating that product at scale, while maintaining regulatory discipline and operational resilience, is another.
Looking beyond cards
Although cards remain central to Cardaq’s business, the company’s ambitions increasingly extend beyond the physical or virtual card itself.
The underlying question is how payment infrastructure can become more flexible for businesses.
For merchants, fintechs and other financial companies, building a payment product from scratch can require relationships with card schemes, banking partners, compliance providers, technology vendors and reporting platforms. Each additional layer can increase complexity.
Cardaq’s strategy has been to bring more of those capabilities closer together: issuing and acquiring, payment accounts, FX, money movement, APIs, card programmes and the supporting technology to connect them, with an API designed to provide automated communication between business systems and Cardaq for financial information and straight-through processing.
The model is becoming increasingly relevant as companies that were never traditional banks begin offering financial products to their own customers.
The fintech market is moving from individual products toward embedded infrastructure.
What comes next for Cardaq?
Cardaq’s stated ambition has never been particularly modest. Remi has spoken of building Cardaq into a global payments company capable of competing with much larger names in the sector.
Whether the company ultimately reaches that scale will depend on factors that extend well beyond technology.
Regulatory requirements will continue to evolve. Fraud will become more sophisticated. Card schemes will change their rules and products. Businesses will expect faster settlement, better reporting and more flexible payment infrastructure. At the same time, competition from banks, processors and fintech infrastructure companies will continue to increase.
Cardaq’s response has been to build deeper into the infrastructure itself.
Its journey from a company established in London in 2011, through a period of restructuring under Hugo Remi, to Principal Membership of the major card schemes and a broader executive team, illustrates one of the more interesting paths through the UK fintech market.
The company is no longer simply trying to participate in the payments ecosystem.
It is trying to become part of the infrastructure on which other businesses can build.
And in a payments industry increasingly defined by invisible technology, regulatory trust and the ability to move money reliably at scale, that may ultimately be the more important position to occupy.
Company Details
Company Name: Cardaq Limited
Contact Person – Cardaq Team
Email Id – support@cardaq.com
Address – London, United Kingdom
SOURCE: Cardaq Limited
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