Zilch

Philip Belamant, Serge Belamant and Sean O’Connor are the entrepreneurial team behind Zilch, a fintech company founded in 2018 and based in London. Philip, who serves as chief executive officer, has a background in building fintech businesses across emerging markets and holds a degree in IT from the University of Johannesburg. Serge, the chairman, is a South African-born entrepreneur and inventor with prior experience in payment-technology systems and has founded multiple companies in the financial-services sector.

O'Connor joined as a co-founder to support product development and business growth. They launched Zilch with the aim of disrupting traditional consumer credit by creating a direct-to-consumer payments platform that offers both debit-card rewards and interest-free credit, built around what they call an “ad-subsidised payments network.” In its launch phase, Zilch secured regulatory consumer-credit authorisation in the UK and then launched publicly in 2020. The company quickly scaled, hitting millions of users and raising significant equity and debt funding to support international growth.

Under their leadership, Zilch has expanded beyond the UK into multiple markets, built out its merchant-partnership ecosystem, and moved toward profitability while innovating around payments, credit and data. The founders have emphasised transparency, user-centric design and leveraging first-party data to serve both customers and merchants. Today, Zilch stands as a high-growth fintech challenger, reflecting the founders’ blend of technical insight, strategic ambition and operational discipline.