Philip Belamant
A serial fintech entrepreneur, the Rand Afrikaans University IT graduate set up and sold on two other payment companies before founding Zilch in 2018. It raced to a $2 billion valuation in just two years, offering a transparent approach to buy-now-pay later services. Belamant’s experience in providing payment platforms in emerging markets – he helped Uber with a method of moving cash onto Mastercard accounts that took the ride-hailing app up a gear there – gave Zilch an edge.
His own path began in a childhood spent in his father Serge’s Johannesburg office, where Belamant senior set up NET1 UEPS, to open channels for transactions between businesses and people without formal banking facilities. The tech-savvy pair would also develop their own mobile games together, as well as becoming rich, reimagining financial infrastructure for a changing world, with Philip taking the family trade out of South Africa and into London and then the US. Married with a son, he won the 2021 Great British Entrepreneur of the Year award, but could not pick it up in person at the Grovesnor Hotel because he was waiting for the results of a Covid test.
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