“If you believe in an idea, say it loud and say it often. When you do, you will believe it, others will believe it, and belief is all it takes to turn an idea into reality.” This is something Edward Haley lives by. He has never hesitated to challenge conventional systems. This perspective led him to establish and manage UnionHub as Founder, CEO, and Chairman. Noticing gaps in the existing infrastructure, he decided to build solutions that added value where systems fell short.
“We asked ourselves a simple question,” Edward shares. “Can we manage benefits for a million members with the same resources it takes to handle a thousand? When we found no scalable solution that could deliver, we built our own.”
This willingness to work on what is not yet available to users made him improve his solutions with every self-assessment that his team and he conducted. He added technological features that made things easier for people looking for simple, advanced, and hassle-free FinTech platforms. Through UnionHub, employers and users have a platform that simplifies and automates payment processing, starting with benefit selections, paying insurance premiums, making payment selections, and automated billing. It brought Edward’s vision to life. The journey has never been smooth, but the efforts he put in for everything to fall in place made all the difference.
Building Culture is Always the First Step
When Edward decided to begin with his idea of implementing solutions that offer a hassle-free FinTech platform to users, he needed a good team. But before having a team, he visualized the culture he wanted to create. Edward is a builder by nature, and his idea of leadership was never about giving orders. Instead, his idea of leadership was about building a culture where team members have the freedom to perform to their best abilities without hesitation. He never aimed to have a team that would work based only on what he wanted. He believed in having a team that would build on each other’s inputs and ensure the best outcomes came from the best minds working toward shared goals.
“Culture is everything. Build talented teams, build culture-dense teams, and everything else follows,” Edward states. “At UnionHub, we build teams rooted in collaboration, mutual respect, and care for one another. Over time, those shared goals turn into friendship.”
For Edward, building trust within the team has always been the foundation of performance. When people feel safe to share ideas, challenge each other, and take ownership, collaboration turns into genuine partnership. Over time, shared goals build friendships, and that sense of unity brings out the best in everyone.
At UnionHub, Edward and his team built a culture rooted in discipline, accountability, and innovation. His time in Sweden broadened his perspective and inspired new ways to connect people and ideas. He values transparency and candor, encouraging every team member to take ownership and see feedback as part of growth, not criticism. That mindset has become one of UnionHub’s greatest strengths.
The culture the entire team built at UnionHub reflects empathy, respect, accountability, and understanding, qualities that drive its ability to deliver meaningful, user-focused solutions.
Leadership Influence Comes from Clarity
“Leadership is about vision, courage, and the relentless drive to make it real,” Edward explains. Where influence is often linked with power and authority, Edward has a different take on being a real influencer. To him, one can influence a crowd or a team only through clarity of thought and purpose. Without clarity, communication becomes confusion, and confusion never leads to influence. Whether it is a concept, an objective, or a process flow, having clarity helps a leader turn even the most complex things into simple explanations, and that’s when transformation begins.
Whether it is creating a team or building a strong clientele, a leader’s clarity is essential to inspire and influence. “In the Americas, influence means creating stability through transparency and momentum through conviction. It is about helping others see what is possible, not just for themselves but for everyone their work touches,” he demonstrates. “Our customers don’t just need to know their data is safe, they need to see that every transaction, every file, and every interaction meets the highest possible standard.”
Edward knew what his team and he needed to achieve. That’s what made them all take baby steps with UnionHub, becoming one of the most trustworthy InsurTech and FinTech solution providers today and making him the Most Influential Leaders to Follow in the Americas, 2025. For Edward, the ripple effect of the work the team did, which improved lives and created truly equitable outcomes across every layer of the ecosystem, has been the real motivation.
Create Value to Earn Trust
Edward’s greatest strength has been his ability to assess every technological solution he comes across. His willingness to dig deep into existing technologies allowed him to see what others missed. The gaps became his opportunities, and he built teams that turned those gaps into breakthroughs. Edward has always built teams that think beyond the box and deliver extraordinary solutions to complex problems, born from the kind of creativity only his team could bring.
“Impossible is not in my vocabulary. I replace it with not yet,” Edward notes. Every decision at UnionHub follows that principle, focused on innovation without compromise and impact without excuses. He continues, “Innovation takes belief, not permission, and the courage to start before the world agrees.”
Edward’s journey took a transformative turn when he realized that none of the existing FinTech solutions could manage a million members with the same resources meant to serve thousands. It was then that he decided not to wait for a solution, but to build it on his own.
“After we launched, we drove self-enrollment rates from 20% to 90%, and it was all automated. We saw self-enrollment numbers that exceeded thousands per day. That is the day I knew we had built something no one had ever built before,” he conveys.
That moment redefined how Edward leads, showing him that true leadership means creating solutions, not relying on systems that fall short. He refuses to settle for what exists simply because it’s available, choosing instead to build something better, and make it work for everyone who needs it. He wanted his team to envision boldly and build with precision and purpose. With UnionHub, he unified benefits, payments, compliance, CRM, and real-time reporting into one fully integrated in-house ecosystem, building an evolved payment platform for the future he saw coming.
Set Priorities to Avoid Complications
Behind every innovation is a discipline that keeps it grounded. For Edward, that discipline begins with priorities. Whether at work or with family, Edward believes overlap only creates complications and prevents people from bringing out their best.
Edward keeps his priorities clear and his circle small. He understands that managing everything alone is impossible, and that realization has lifted a tremendous amount of pressure. He trusts his systems and his people. The processes he’s built operate efficiently without micromanagement. This trust is why his teams achieve consistently strong results with or without his direct oversight.
He is the architect who creates the roadmap, sets the vision, and trusts his team to execute with precision. By empowering them to deliver on timelines that align with market opportunity, he ensures that every build moves at the speed of relevance.
Challenges Make You a Better Problem Solver
Edward has never shied away from challenges. Each obstacle strengthened his problem-solving skills and united his team. He prepared them to face criticism with confidence and gratitude, reminding them that resilience is built together, not alone.
“You cannot argue with logic,” he remarks. The challenges, Edward believes, are mostly built on logic, and every leader or team must have answers or a resolution available with them whenever their system or processes are questioned. Hence, addressing grievances and queries of the users has always been the prime responsibility of Edward and the team at UnionHub. And that has been something that helped them overcome the biggest challenge, i.e., earning credibility in an industry “resistant to change.”
The UnionHub team had no major backing. The only thing it had was conviction. Edward remembers how every delivery led to overcoming doubts, how every process, when simplified, perfected the system, and how every query solved added up to the trust the brand built, turning “skeptics into believers.”
Those lessons in resilience became the foundation of his leadership philosophy, one he now shares freely with the next generation.
Advice for Aspiring Leaders
He recommends that the youth develop critical thinking and work hard to make sure the solutions they come up with are hassle-free and time-saving. Edward also advises aspiring leaders to have a sense of accountability and refrain from the blame game, as that’s not what defines a leader. To lead, one must own the mistakes as one owns achievements. As someone who leads, they must lift people by collaborating with them. Once a team with culture is built, the rest of the things will automatically follow.
Where FinTech Meets the Future
The future is real time. Real-time payments, underwriting, notifications, and decision support powered by intelligent AI systems that provide clarity, not noise. UnionHub is already there.
The U.S. ACH system still operates on analog rails built decades ago and remains tied to Federal Reserve settlement hours. ACH payments are processed only while banks are open, which means the system effectively shuts down nearly 40% of every year. That downtime creates strain on recurring payments and leads to payment delays, shortfalls, and unforced errors across payroll, benefits, and billing cycles.
UnionHub bet on ACH early because Edward knew it had to evolve to remain competitive. Years before the market was ready, he and his team began building 24/7 payment processing technology designed to operate beyond traditional banking hours. The introduction of the FedNow Service and the modernization of ACH settlement are now proving that vision right. Transfers between financial institutions are already moving toward continuous, always-on availability, and it is only a matter of time before that capability reaches consumers and businesses at scale.
When UnionHub launched PeakPay™ in 2023, its proprietary payment gateway, the goal was to process one million dollars in voluntary insurance payments during the first year. Within that year, they did it in a single day. “That achievement confirmed what we already believed, that demand exists, the system is ready, and with 24/7 processing, technology, timing, and conviction, we can redefine how money moves across the entire voluntary benefits ecosystem, effectively creating a new industry within an industry,” Edward says.
On the InsurTech side, the focus is on access and frictionless adoption. UnionHub’s technology removes traditional employer, broker, and insurer burdens through automation and AI, making the process easy for all parties involved. These challenges are particularly complex for large enterprise companies, yet UnionHub’s dual innovation in payments and benefits is accelerating adoption across the United States.
Reprogramming an industry that has operated decades behind the times is no small task. It is where UnionHub thrives, transforming what once seemed impossible into something simple, scalable, and accessible.
UnionHub has always pursued products and services that add genuine value to everyday lives. But the mission does not stop there. Edward and his team are now shaping what comes next, a fully connected ecosystem where payments, benefits, and compliance move in real time, guided by intelligence rather than inertia. As the financial and insurance industries continue to converge, UnionHub is building the infrastructure for that future, one where trust, transparency, and technology work together to make complexity simple.
