UKTN | The Podcast

Philip Belamant, CEO and co-founder of Zilch, is our final guest of the season. Zilch is a buy now, pay later platform that hit double unicorn status by being the fastest growing company out of Europe and the UK. Belamant talks at length on Zilch taking on the American market with a preregistration of over 150,000 customers. He gets into the extraordinary growth they have experienced increasing from 20,000 to 2.2 million customers in just 18 months. Belamant gets honest about losing out on funding at the beginning of the pandemic and the difficult decisions they faced in deciding between onboarding new customers versus delivering a quality service to existing customers.

Zilch has raised $339.3M in funding to date and are currently valued at more than $2bn.

Show Notes

Zilch co-founder and CEO, Philip Belamant, gets candid on disrupting the fintech sector, catapulting Zilch to double unicorn status and being the fastest growing company out of Europe and the UK. He gets into their American takeover, with a preregistration of over 150,000 customers ahead of their stateside launch based out of Miami. Belamant delves on the astounding growth of their customer base, going from 20,000 to 2.2 million customers in just 18 months. He gets honest on the difficult decisions they faced when deciding between the rapid onboarding of new customers versus quality of service of existing - something they now use AI for as they have expanded. Having lost out on funding at the beginning of the pandemic, Belamant talks in depth on what impact this had on the company and how they came back from that loss to now stand at a total of $339.3M in funding and a company value of more than $2bn.
 
Belamant is a serial entrepreneur and the CEO and Co-founder of the double unicorn fintech Zilch, recently valued at over $2bn. Before Zilch, Belamant founded, developed, and sold two other successful fintech ventures. The first provided value-added mobile payment services that grew to over 20 million users in 15 different countries across India, Africa, and Europe, which led Belamant to conceive and launch South Africa’s first cash-to-Mastercard system for Uber that became a top 40 fintech company. Belamant was named Entrepreneur of the Year for 2021 by the Great British Entrepreneur Awards for leading Zilch to the forefront of the changing payments landscape. 

What is UKTN | The Podcast?

Each week, Jane Wakefield sits down with some of the key movers and shakers from the UK tech ecosystem for the UKTN Podcast. Learn growth strategies from both seasoned and up-and-coming founders, hear market sentiments from investors, and understand the tech policy affecting businesses across the country.

The UKTN Podcast provides insight into the most influential people in the UK’s innovation economy, exploring their personal and professional journeys and hearing their views on the hottest tech topics of the day.