Zilch, the world’s first ad-subsidised payments network (ASPN), has extended its collaboration with cloud provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) to accelerate the rollout of AI innovation across the Zilch proposition.
Zilch will continue to use AWS AI and ML services to transform how the company serves its customers and works with merchants in the future. This includes services such as Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service for building, training and deploying ML models at scale, and Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that makes high-performing foundation models (FMs) from leading AI startups and Amazon available through a single application programming interface (API), to make quicker and more precise decisions based on patterns and data modelling.
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 four million customers, Zilch now uses AI to set personalised affordability limits for each customer more accurately. Zilch 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 is well positioned to leverage AWS’s ML and AI services due to the large volume of high-quality data held within its data lake, which is built on AWS. Over the past four years, Zilch’s direct-to-consumer model has generated over half a billion customer data sets and, with 80,000 new customers joining Zilch every month, and more than 3,000 requests processed per second, Zilch is adding approximately 5.4 terabytes of data every week.
In addition, more than 50% of Zilch’s active customers are signed up for open banking, providing the lender with unrivalled data and insights into the spending and credit landscape.
The commercial impact of the use of AI and ML services will be substantial. The expanded use of AWS’s AI and ML services for personalisation and intent prediction is projected by Zilch to accelerate sales in the next two years and to improve customer service and lending decisions. Unlocking deeper insights into underwriting and visibility in fraud detection will generate an improvement of at least 10% in near-term model performance.
Completely rethinking what people do with their money, Zilch has worked closely with AWS since the company’s inception, prioritising technological innovation to scale its award-winning services and to redefine how to match buyers and sellers in the world of payments, advertising and consumer lending.
“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, 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, Zilch 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.
“We first called AWS back in 2018 when we merely sketched out the first tech architecture, so Zilch was literally born in the cloud. Today we’re proud to run the majority of our infrastructure on AWS. This has allowed us to seamlessly handle the massive scale we’ve achieved. We’re now shifting gears up to fully unleash our upgraded AI strategy and hiring top AI talent. This will see us rapidly move beyond our current industry-leading cloud operations and into a new hyperscale data and AI-driven cloud environment,” said Sean Hederman, Chief Technology Officer, Zilch.
