Executive Team

Robert Gregory Kidd is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Hard Yaka since 2010 and, since 2024, the majority shareholder in Vast Bank Holdings, a nationally chartered bank. As an investor, Mr. Kidd provided first money at Twitter, Square (Block), Coinbase, Robinhood, and Solana. Other early investments include Ripple, Uphold, and Brave. After working at the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton from 1984 to 1990, Mr. Kidd took his first company, DMSC, public on the Nasdaq with $250 million in revenue and 3,200 staff globally. He later served in the payments division of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from 2002 to 2004 and as a senior director at the financial regulatory consulting firm Promontory Financial Group from 2004 to 2010. Mr. Kidd also served as Chief Risk Officer at Ripple from 2013 to 2015. In 2024, Mr. Kidd was a nonpartisan candidate running for Congress in Nevada's 2nd District. Mr. Kidd graduated with an A.B. from Brown University and earned an MBA from Yale University and an MPA in public policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School.

Kitty Payne has over 30 years of experience leading and serving public and private companies in the financial services industry. Prior to joining USBC, Inc., she served in a number of key executive leadership roles including Chief Financial Officer of First Entertainment Credit Union, a not-for-profit financial institution headquartered in Hollywood, CA that supports creators of entertainment, from September 2024 to May 2025, and SVP, Controller and principal accounting officer of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, a member-owned government-sponsored cooperative administering affordable housing mission contribution programs and providing low-cost funding to member institutions in California, Nevada and Arizona, from November 2021 to July 2024. She has also served as a Consultant to Hard Yaka Ventures since May 2025 and Chief Financial Officer of Community Bank of the Bay in Oakland, CA (OTCBB: CBOBA) from July 2024 to October 2024. From February 2019 to November 2021, Ms. Payne served as Chief Financial Officer of Commercial Bank of California, a privately held commercial bank with dual headquarters in Orange County and Los Angeles, and its wholesale ACH financial technology subsidiary company. Ms. Payne also has extensive experience with public companies, including serving as an executive of Fidelity Bank (Nasdaq:LION) from 2013 to 2018, Capital Bank (Nasdaq:CBF) from 2010 to 2013 and First National Bank of the South (Nasdaq:FNSC) from 1999 through 2010. Ms. Payne is an alumna of the global professional services firm, KPMG, where she spent the first seven years of her professional career from 1992 to 1999. She holds a B.S. in Financial Management from Clemson University and is a Certified Public Accountant in the state of South Carolina.

Kirk Chapman brings more than 20 years of technical banking and payment experience to the Company. He is the co-founder and CEO of Omnumi, Inc., from February 2023 to present, an identity and compliance based stablecoin platform that underpins USBC. Prior to joining the Company, he served as the Chief Operating Officer of Hard Yaka Ventures from March 2025 to August 2025. He previously served as Advisor to Anthony Noto, CEO of SoFi from August 2017 to June 2022 during the billion dollar acquisitions of Galileo and Technisys as well as the acquisition of nationally chartered Golden Pacific Bank. Mr. Chapman served as Head of Strategy at Galileo from August 2021 to June 2022 and VP of Technology Ops at SoFi from August 2017 to August 2021. Prior to SoFi, Mr. Chapman served as Head of Technology at Independence National Bank from 2016-2017, where he was responsible for leading and building an online lending platform to compete in the SoFi, Lending Club, Prosper marketplace. His team successfully completed the first US installation of a global banking core, which included connectivity to global card issuers and processors. Mr. Chapman has a B.S. in Business Administration and Management from Bob Jones University.

Former Chief Medical Leader, Diabetes and Endocrinology at Eli Lilly, Chief of Medicine at the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, Director at Generex, and Medical Director at Catapult Health.

Dominic Klyve, Ph.D., a long-time consultant and previous employee of the Company, joins as Chief Science Officer. Dr. Klyve previously served as lead data scientist at Know Labs. As Chief Science Officer, he will be responsible for leading the research and development team in its efforts to build the first non-invasive glucose monitor. Klyve has been an author on several studies published by Know Labs, including its most recent peer-reviewed study published in IEEE Sensors Journal detailing historical developments and limitations with RF-based sensing technologies, and the distinctiveness of Know Labs’ sensor architecture and trade-secret prediction machine learning algorithm. Klyve is the author of more than 80 peer-reviewed publications in several fields of science and mathematics and has served as Principal Investigator on grants from the National Science Foundation (among others) worth over $1.5 million. He holds a professorship at Central Washington University, where he is currently on sabbatical, and is a former Editor of the College Mathematics Journal.

John Cronin joins the day-to-day team as Interim Chief Technology Officer. Previously, Cronin was elected as a member of the Company’s Board of Directors. He has been a strategic advisor and consultant to Know Labs, supporting the Company’s expanding patent portfolio and securing its global leadership as the top patent holder in the non-invasive blood glucose monitoring category. Cronin will oversee the Company’s product development and technology strategy and help the Know Labs team develop test protocols to address research and development questions. In addition, Cronin spearheads the Know Labs “skunkworks” activities which explores new applications for the Company’s platform technology, an example of which is the recently announced automobile steering wheel application of our sensor platform. Cronin is the founder and CEO of ipCapital Group, Inc., a leading global advisory company on intellectual property strategy and monetization. Cronin began his career at IBM where he was the sole inventor of breakthrough chip design technology and later, he became IBM’s top inventor. He went on to create the IBM Patent Factory, growing IBM’s patent portfolio from ninth to first in the world catapulting IBM’s IP licensing from $30 million to over $2 billion a year. Today, Mr. Cronin has approximately 1800 patents and applications worldwide.

Founder of Know Labs, Ron has 30 years of board, business development, financial, and executive leadership experience from industries including therapeutics, mobile technologies, and software. Previously, Chairman and CEO of eCharge Corporation, Chairman and Co-founder of Blue Frog Mobile, Chairman and CEO of GlobalTel Resources, and Chairman and CEO of Egghead Software.