Zilch launched in September 2020 and has since had over two million customers in the UK.
(Picture: Zilch )A London "buy now, pay later" start-up is opening up in Miami as the fintech tries to crack America.
Zilch plans to recruit 100 new employees for the new office, its first in the US.
CEO Philip Belamant said: “With the cost of living going up, and with people paying billions of dollars in fees and interest, we think it’s the perfect time to us to launch a product like ours which eliminates those costs for customers but provides the same benefits.”
Belamant slammed the “unacceptable and fundamentally misaligned” fees and interest charged by credit card companies. Americans paid around $120 billion per year in credit card interest and fees between 2018 and 2020 according to research by the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Zilch launched in September 2020 and has since had over two million customers in the UK. The company became a unicorn in November 2021 after closing a $110 million (£89 million) funding round, valuing the company at over $2 billion.
Almost 1 in 10 people in the UK have used BNPL schemes to pay for essentials, according to research by Hargreaves Lansdown, as consumers look to alternate methods to afford basic items amid soaring food and energy prices.
“What we are seeing is a slight shift with people not just using [BNPL] for discretionary purposes, they’re using it for non-discretionary purposes as well,” Belamant said.
The UK government plans to introduce legislation to allow BNPL schemes to be brought under Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) regulation. It follows the publication of the FCA’s Woolard Review into the unsecured credit market, which raised concerns over the potential of vulnerable consumers using multiple BNPL providers to create high levels of indebtedness.
Zilch has also announced a partnership with credit rating business Experian to exchange data on consumer payment plans in a bid to improve transparency.
“They collect over 1 billion data points a month,” Belamant said. “That puts us in a good position to manage our books and how our customers are spending with us.”
