Zilch expands partnership with AWS to advance AI innovation

By Gloria Methri

Zilch, a UK-based ad-subsidised payments network, has extended its collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to accelerate the rollout of AI innovation across the Zilch proposition.

Zilch will continue to use AWS AI & ML services to transform how the company serves its customers and works with merchants. This includes services such as Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock. 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 more accurately set personalised affordability limits for each customer. The company 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 projects that the expanded use of AWS’s AI and ML services for personalisation and intent prediction will accelerate sales in the next two years and improve customer service and lending decisions.

“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 of 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, the company 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.