One of London's hottest fintech startups just lured a Silicon Valley veteran to be CTO

International money transfer startup WorldRemit has lured a 23-year Silicon Valley veteran to be its new chief technology officer.

Gabriella Poczo is joining the London-based startup to help oversee the businesses expansion.

Poczo spent 13 years at SUN Microsystems and four at Skype, where she spearheaded the company's shift from desktop to mobile. She has also served at T-Mobile and messaging service textPlus.

WorldRemit is one of London's hottest startups, valued at $500 million (£320 million) earlier this year. The company specialises in international money transfers to mobile wallets as opposed to bank accounts. These are hugely popular in emerging markets.

WorldRemit is currently seeing 300,000 transactions a month and 30% of those coming out of Europe are going to mobile wallets. These types of transactions are also the fastest growing segment.

Poczo told Business Insider: "I met with Ismail [Ahmed, WorldRemit's founder and CEO] and Richard [Igoe, WorldRemit's current CTO] and I connected with the challenges. One of the things that was really a joy at Skype was that every day you knew you were helping people.

"Most of our [WorldRemit's] competitors are solving first world problems, they're solving rich people's problems. We're out there in the trenches. It's hard work. We're building out the network."

WorldRemit covers 21 mobile wallets across 15 countries and Poczo says her main job is facilitating the expansion of this. All the wallets WorldRemit plugs into were built separately so the challenge is to make a unified system that can send money across these diverse networks seamlessly.

Poczo says: "While currently we do service 21 mobile wallets, which represents 66 million people out of 300 million registered users, there's still growth there. We want to become ubiquitous with mobile money and mobile wallets. In order to scale in that theatre requires people, process, and technology."