After holding senior roles at Revolut and Tamara, Chris Hughes founded Sinder with former Revolut engineer Artem Kuchumov. The Dubai-built fintech has launched an AED account and travel-focused Mastercard debit card for UAE residents, beginning with a simple proposition: make international spending easier to understand and less expensive.

In this founder interview, Hughes discusses the behaviour behind Sinder’s product strategy, why fintech companies should avoid rebuilding infrastructure that already exists, and how a very small AI-enabled team can attempt to build a meaningful regulated financial business.

ArabianFinTech: For readers discovering Sinder for the first time, what are you building?

Chris Hughes: Sinder is a travel-focused financial account for UAE residents.

Customers receive an AED account with a local IBAN and a Mastercard Platinum Debit card issued through Ruya Community Islamic Bank. They can fund the account in dirhams and use the card internationally, with foreign-currency transactions converted at the Mastercard Exchange Rate.

Our Founder Card currently provides 0% Sinder FX markup within an AED 40,000 monthly international-spending allowance. There is no annual fee, monthly subscription or minimum balance, and the Founder pricing is grandfathered for eligible early customers.

The card is the entry point, but the longer-term product is broader. We want to build the financial and travel layer that helps UAE residents manage life across borders.

ArabianFinTech: What originally convinced you that Sinder needed to exist?

Chris Hughes: I did not start with the view that the UAE needed another payment card. There are already a lot of cards.

The issue is that the financial lives of internationally mobile residents are still unnecessarily fragmented. People earn in the UAE, support family in another country, travel regularly, shop internationally and often maintain accounts across several markets. Their financial behaviour is global, but most products are still designed as if their lives happen in one place.

International spending is a particularly visible example. The real cost can be spread across the exchange rate, card fees, subscription conditions, rewards structures and eligibility requirements. Most customers cannot easily calculate what they are really paying.

Sinder began with a simple belief: customers should be able to understand and verify the price of using their own money.

ArabianFinTech: Why did you choose travel and international spending as the initial focus?

Chris Hughes: A good fintech wedge should correspond to a real pattern of behaviour rather than simply being a feature that sounds attractive.

Travel concentrates a series of financial problems into a short period. Customers are spending in foreign currencies, managing budgets, thinking about visas, comparing destinations, dealing with unfamiliar merchants and trying to avoid unexpected costs.

That gives us a clear initial job to do: help UAE residents spend and make decisions more confidently when they are outside the country.

It is also a logical starting point for a much larger financial relationship. Once a customer trusts you with international spending, there are adjacent needs around remittances, local payments, benefits, travel services, savings and cross-border financial products.

We are not trying to assemble an arbitrary list of fintech features. The expansion sequence should follow the customer’s actual financial life.

ArabianFinTech: How is Sinder different from the travel cards already available in the UAE?

Chris Hughes: The first distinction is transparency.

Some products advertise rewards or international benefits, but the customer may still need to understand the exchange rate being used, the foreign transaction charge, the annual fee and the conditions required to receive the advertised value.

We have tried to make the proposition legible. Customers spend from an AED balance, foreign transactions use the Mastercard Exchange Rate and Sinder’s own markup is disclosed clearly.

The second distinction is that we are building specifically around internationally mobile UAE residents. The travel tools are not being added to a generic bank account as a marketing layer. They are part of the product architecture.

For example, our “Where Can I Go?” tool helps residents explore destinations based on visa requirements, flight time, likely cost and the type of trip they are considering. Over time, the account, card and travel experience should increasingly operate as one product.

ArabianFinTech: How have your experiences at Revolut and Tamara shaped your approach?

Chris Hughes: Revolut showed me the power of entering through one sharp customer problem and then expanding the relationship over time. It also demonstrated what becomes possible when product, operations, finance and technology are treated as one connected system.

Tamara gave me a much deeper appreciation for regional execution. The Gulf is not a market where you can simply import a successful European or American product and change the branding. Customer behaviour, regulation, infrastructure and commercial relationships are different.

The wrong lesson would be to build a smaller copy of Revolut.

The useful lesson is methodological: find a behaviour that is not being served properly, build a materially better experience around it, measure whether customers actually change their behaviour and then earn the right to expand.

That is the approach we are applying to Sinder.

ArabianFinTech: Sinder has been built by an unusually small core team. How has that been possible?

Chris Hughes: Artem and I both came from environments where we saw how a relatively small number of strong operators could build systems used by millions of people.

We have also built Sinder at a point when AI is beginning to change the operating model of a company, not merely the features inside its app.

We use AI across research, product analysis, documentation, quality assurance, operational workflows, customer support, content and internal decision-making. It allows a small team to cover far more surface area and move between disciplines much more quickly.

For us, AI is not primarily a chatbot or a customer-facing gimmick. It is part of the organisational architecture.

That does not eliminate the need for experienced people, judgement or control. Financial products require accountability. But I believe a focused team of perhaps 10 or 20 exceptional people can now build a fintech that would previously have required a substantially larger organisation.

ArabianFinTech: You are also relying on established banking and payments infrastructure. Why take that approach?

Chris Hughes: Because rebuilding infrastructure is not automatically the same thing as creating customer value.

The Sinder account and card are issued through Ruya Community Islamic Bank. Network International supports the processing infrastructure, and Mastercard provides the international card network. These are serious institutions operating within established regulatory and risk frameworks.

Our role is to build the customer experience, pricing logic, product layer and travel proposition on top of that infrastructure.

This model allows us to focus our limited resources on the part that customers actually interact with, while working with partners that already have the required capabilities in banking, compliance, processing and settlement.

There is a tendency in technology to treat owning every layer as inherently superior. I do not agree. The right question is which layers genuinely need to be proprietary for you to create a better product and a durable business.

ArabianFinTech: What have you learned from Sinder’s early beta?

Chris Hughes: The most encouraging signal is that people found us and started using the product before we conducted a formal public launch or spent money on customer acquisition.

As of 20 July 2026, 173 accounts had been created, 62 customers had become active and 33 had funded their accounts. Eleven early transacting customers had completed 106 payments worth more than AED 8,400, while customer balances exceeded AED 48,000.

Those are still small numbers, and we should be honest about that. But at this stage, the quality of the behaviour matters more than producing a large registration number.

An account registration is an expression of interest. Funding an account is stronger. Making a transaction is stronger again. Repeatedly choosing the card when spending abroad is the real test.

We are trying to build the company around that hierarchy of evidence.

ArabianFinTech: What has been most difficult about launching a regulated fintech?

Chris Hughes: The final 10% is much harder than the first 90%.

It is relatively easy to design an attractive app or demonstrate a controlled transaction. It is much harder to make every part of the customer journey work reliably across onboarding, compliance, account creation, card production, fulfilment, processing, settlement and support.

A customer does not care which partner, system or API caused a delay. From their perspective, it is all Sinder.

Our beta has exposed friction around areas such as KYC review and physical-card fulfilment. That can be uncomfortable, but it is precisely why a controlled production pilot matters. The purpose is to uncover operational reality before attempting to scale demand.

I do not believe a fintech has truly launched because its app is available in an app store. It has launched when customers can deposit real money, use the product repeatedly and trust that it will work.

ArabianFinTech: What role does Islamic finance play in the Sinder proposition?

Chris Hughes: Our account and card are issued through Ruya Community Islamic Bank, and that is an important part of the product.

I believe Islamic finance should be capable of producing products that compete on quality, transparency and customer experience, rather than relying only on religious identification as the reason someone should choose them.

Fairness and clarity are practical product principles. Customers should understand the price, avoid unnecessary complexity and retain control over their own money.

At the same time, Sinder is not designed to be useful only to Muslim customers. The product should be compelling to any eligible UAE resident who travels or spends internationally.

The strongest outcome is to build something consistent with Islamic financial principles that also wins because it is objectively a very good product.

ArabianFinTech: How do you decide what Sinder should build next?

Chris Hughes: We are trying to be much more disciplined about starting with behaviour rather than starting with ideas.

The question is not simply, “What feature could we add?” It is, “What does the financial life of this customer actually look like, and where is the evidence that the current system is failing them?”

That evidence can come from our own users, transaction behaviour, support conversations or the economics of existing banks and fintechs. When large amounts of money are being made from complexity, inactivity or customer misunderstanding, that can be a sign that the product has not been fully optimised around the customer’s behaviour.

We then look for a narrow way to improve that behaviour, measure whether customers respond and expand only when the evidence supports it.

That process is less glamorous than announcing a grand vision, but it is a more reliable way to build one.

ArabianFinTech: What is your longer-term ambition for Sinder?

Chris Hughes: The ambition is for Sinder to become the default financial account for the international part of a UAE resident’s life.

Today, the clearest expression of that is a travel-focused AED account and debit card. Over time, it can extend into local payments, remittances, travel benefits, digital wallets, international accounts and other cross-border services.

The underlying thesis is that the UAE has a large population whose financial lives are unusually international. That behaviour deserves a purpose-built financial product.

We also want to demonstrate a different model for building fintech companies in the region: a small, highly capable team working with established regulated infrastructure, using AI throughout the organisation and allocating capital very deliberately.

The goal is not to remain a small card programme. The goal is to use a focused initial wedge to build a meaningful financial platform.

ArabianFinTech: What advice would you give to founders building financial products in the Gulf?

Chris Hughes: Do not confuse the narrative with the evidence.

A compelling story can help you recruit people, form partnerships and raise capital. But the story is not the company. The company is whether customers complete onboarding, deposit money, use the product, return and eventually generate sustainable economics.

I would also avoid benchmarking an early-stage company against a fintech that has already raised hundreds of millions of dollars. You do not need to imitate its organisational structure, marketing budget or feature count.

You need to identify one important behaviour, solve it unusually well and build a system that helps you learn faster than larger competitors.

In fintech, credibility ultimately comes from execution. Money moving successfully through the product is more persuasive than almost anything you can put into a presentation.

About Chris Hughes

Chris Hughes is the Founder and CEO of Sinder. Before founding the company, he held senior product and finance roles at Revolut and served as Head of Core Product at Tamara. His experience spans financial products, payments, operating systems and data architecture.

About Sinder

Sinder is a Dubai-based financial technology company building a travel-focused account for UAE residents. Its product combines an AED account with a local IBAN, a Ruya-issued Mastercard Platinum Debit card, transparent international-spending pricing and practical travel tools.

Eligible UAE residents can download Sinder on iOS or Android and apply for the Founder Card.