- Zilch levels up its artificial intelligence (AI) and machine
learning (ML) engine, drawing on its unrivalled insights into the
mass market spending and credit landscape
- Investment in new AI capabilities is already transforming
Zilch’s processes for credit underwriting, fraud detection and
buyer intent analysis
- Expanded use of Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) AI and ML
services projected to accelerate sales in next two years, and
improve customer service and lending decisions
Zilch, the world’s first ad-subsidised payments network (ASPN),
announces today that it has extended its collaboration with cloud
provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) to accelerate the rollout of
Artificial Intelligence (AI) innovation across the Zilch
proposition.
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the full release here:
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Philip Belamant, CEO and co-founder of
Zilch, delivering a keynote on stage at the AWS London Summit,
where he announced a collaboration between AWS and Zilch to
accelerate the rollout of AI innovation across the Zilch
proposition. (Photo: Business Wire)
Zilch will continue to use AWS AI and ML services to transform
how the company serves its customers and works with merchants in
the future. This includes services such as Amazon SageMaker, a
fully managed service for building, training and deploying ML
models at scale, and Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that
makes high-performing foundation models (FMs) from leading AI
startups and Amazon available through a single application
programming interface (API), to make quicker and more precise
decisions based on patterns and data modelling. Zilch’s use of AWS
is already shortening development times, allowing the company to
add almost twice the amount of data into its models whilst halving
the build time.
With its AI engine trained on years of lending data to its
almost 4 million customers, Zilch now uses AI to set personalised
affordability limits for each customer more accurately. Zilch also
uses AI for fraud detection and to understand buyer intent, with
various AI models already in use for use cases like tracking
popular retailers and consumer demand.
Zilch is well positioned to leverage AWS’s ML and AI services
due to the large volume of high-quality data held within its data
lake, which is built on AWS. Over the past four years, Zilch’s
direct-to-consumer model has generated over half a billion customer
data sets and, with 80,000 new customers joining Zilch every month,
and more than 3,000 requests processed per second, Zilch is adding
approximately 5.4 terabytes of data every week. In addition, more
than 50% of Zilch’s active customers are signed up for open
banking, providing the lender with unrivalled data and insights
into the spending and credit landscape.
The commercial impact of the use of AI and ML services will be
substantial. The expanded use of AWS’s AI and ML services for
personalisation and intent prediction is projected by Zilch to
accelerate sales in the next two years and to improve customer
service and lending decisions. Unlocking deeper insights into
underwriting and visibility in fraud detection will generate an
improvement of at least 10% in near-term model performance.
Completely rethinking what people do with their money, Zilch has
worked closely with AWS since the company’s inception, prioritising
technological innovation to scale its award-winning services and to
redefine how to match buyers and sellers in the world of payments,
advertising and consumer lending.
“Our customers use Zilch around 100 times a year, which gives us
15-18 times the data available to our closest peers,” said Philip
Belamant, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Zilch. “The
combination of our large, high-quality data sets and AWS’s AI and
ML services is going to give us a very tangible competitive
advantage. Zilch will be using AI to invest in increasing the
productivity of our people, accelerating unit economics and
creating more value for our customers.”
“We’re delighted that Zilch has selected AWS to bring the
transformative potential of AI and generative AI to consumer
lending. With Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock, Zilch is able to
deliver more accurate and faster lending decisions, and expand its
offer to more consumers across the UK and into new geographies and
markets,” said Tricia Troth, Head of Startups, UK and Ireland, at
AWS.
“We first called AWS back in 2018 when we merely sketched out
the first tech architecture, so Zilch was literally born in the
cloud. Today we’re proud to run the majority of our infrastructure
on AWS. This has allowed us to seamlessly handle the massive scale
we’ve achieved. We’re now shifting gears up to fully unleash our
upgraded AI strategy and hiring top AI talent. This will see us
rapidly move beyond our current industry-leading cloud operations
and into a new hyperscale data and AI-driven cloud environment,”
said Sean Hederman, Chief Technology Officer, Zilch.
About Zilch
Zilch’s vision is to eliminate the cost of consumer credit. For
good.
Zilch is a multi-award-winning direct-to-consumer ad-subsidised
payments network. Leveraging its unique vertically integrated,
first party data business model to set itself apart from the
incumbent fintech industry with a profitable global revenue source,
bringing unrivalled value to customers and marketers alike. Today
Zilch is revolutionising the $50 trillion advertising and payments
industries by merging the very best of debit, credit, and
savings.
Zilch provides millions of customers the freedom to go anywhere
in the world (online or offline) and when they pay, earn up to 5%
cashback & rewards on debit payments (‘Pay Now’) or spread
interest-free credit repayments over six weeks and pay in three
months. In the process help build their credit profiles with the
major credit agencies. Within 36 months since launch in 2020, Zilch
amassed more than 3.6 million registered customers.
With the launch of its proprietary Ad-Subsidised-Payments
Network (ASPN), Zilch allows retailers worldwide instant connection
with millions of Zilch’s first-party data, closed loop network of
high intent customers. Offering customers personalised savings,
deals and discounts codified to their habitual spend.
In January 2023, Zilch struck a ground-breaking reporting
agreement with the UK’s prime credit reference agencies,
transforming the UK lending ecosystem by enabling 50m+ adults to
build their credit records using interest-free credit rather than
high-cost revolving credit products.
Since April 2020, Zilch has been regulated by the Financial
Conduct Authority (FCA), obtaining a consumer credit licence
through the Regulatory Sandbox Programme.
For more information, visit: www.zilch.com
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Zilch – Ryan Mendy, Chief Communications Officer:
Comms@zilch.com
For any media enquiries, please contact:
zilch@hawthornadvisors.com