In a significant push towards enhancing its AI capabilities, Zilch, a pioneering ad-subsidised payments network, has announced an expansion of its partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS). This collaboration is set to transform the way Zilch leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) across its payment and credit systems, potentially redefining the consumer lending landscape.

Zilch, which first launched in 2020, has rapidly grown into a key player in the fintech sector. Positioned as the world’s first ad-subsidised payments network, Zilch offers a unique blend of payment solutions that merge aspects of debit, credit, and savings while rewarding customers with cashback and other benefits. At the heart of Zilch’s service offering is its proprietary use of direct-to-consumer, first-party data which not only fuels its business model but also provides significant value to both consumers and marketers.

The use of AWS’s technology, specifically Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock, is central to Zilch’s strategy. These technologies enable Zilch to build, train, and deploy machine learning models more efficiently, effectively halving the build time and doubling the data input. This capability allows for sophisticated and more accurate credit underwriting, enhanced fraud detection, and improved analysis of buyer intent.

Delving deeper into its tech architecture, Zilch maintains a substantial data repository powered by AWS. The company has amassed over half a billion customer data sets within four years. With 80,000 new customers joining monthly and an inflow of approximately 5.4 terabytes of data every week, the scale of data integration is vast. This extensive data utilization facilitates a highly personalized service wherein Zilch can set personalised affordability limits and harness open banking data to enrich its insights further.

The expansion of AI and ML usage is anticipated to deliver tangible commercial benefits. Zilch projects a significant acceleration in sales over the next two years and anticipates these technological advancements will refine customer service experiences and lending decisions. This kind of AI-driven personalization is not just about improving operational efficiencies but is also about deepening consumer engagements and trust, which are critical in the competitive fintech market.

Philip Belamant, the CEO and co-founder of Zilch, emphasized the competitive edge this technology offers, stating that the synergy between Zilch’s large data sets and AWS’s robust AI/ML capabilities would enhance productivity and create more value for customers.

AWS too has expressed enthusiasm for this partnership, with Tricia Troth, the Head of Startups UK and Ireland at AWS, highlighting that this collaboration could transform consumer lending through more accurate and faster decision-making processes.

As Zilch continues to leverage AWS for its infrastructure, the focus remains on enhancing its technologically advanced, data-driven service offerings. Not just limiting itself to the UK, Zilch aims to exploit these technological advancements to expand geographically and across new market segments, preserving its innovative edge in the evolving digital payments and fintech arena.