A Technologist? Really? When asked what they want to be when they grow up, most kids will answer: police officer, actor, astronaut, vet. But not Zilch co-founder Philip Belamant. Even back then, he wanted to be a technologist and change the world.
Impressive. I had to Google what one was. According to job site Indeed, a technologist is someone who ‘uses their expertise to manage technology and solve technical problems’.
This is apt, because Philip is, above all else, a problem solver.
Before we meet, I listen to a number of podcasts he’s guested on recently, largely to talk about how he has managed to build the UK and Europe’s fastest-ever growing ‘tech unicorn’, a company valued at $1billion or more. Even more impressively, he grew the firm from launch to $2billion in its first 14 months.
Words that come up a lot with Philip include: problem, solution, action, discipline, build, focus and trust. When boiled down to those seven words, it’s perhaps not hard to see how the 40-year-old South African has achieved what he has.
But there is more to him than the simple desire to solve a Rubik’s Cube. Philip is driven by the sense that in solving a problem, the solution is doing some ‘good for society’.
In a nutshell, Zilch is an app you can buy stuff through just like a credit card, debit card or buy now, pay later, but you pay no interest on anything you borrow. None. Nada. Zilch.
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This is pretty wow in financial services. Companies that let you borrow money for free… said no one ever before. And yet this is Zilch’s mission. In its own words, it wants to ‘eliminate the high cost of consumer credit. For good.’
Why, I ask? Yes, you’re disrupting an industry that makes tens of billions of pounds out of British consumers each year. Yes, you’re building a company worth billions. But are you doing that to solve a problem because it can be solved, or to help customers for their sake? He thinks.
‘Look, no one grows up thinking, I want to disrupt financial services when I’m older, do they?’ he says. ‘But I’ve learned over my career that if I want to keep getting up in the morning to build a business, it has to be meaningful for me as well as solving a problem.’
In 2006, still living in Africa, Philip started a mobile gaming company, PBel. It evolved into a business that had nothing to do with games, instead transforming the way that people bought mobile credit, or airtime, as it’s known in Africa.
It began in Namibia, a place where huge numbers of people lacked a bank account and relied on cash to pay for everything. This meant mobile phone users would have to travel physically to buy airtime from shops or other vendors.
‘They worked all week to earn money for their families and then spent all weekend away from them to buy airtime so they could speak to them during the week,’ says Philip.
PBel let them purchase airtime from their phones. Problem fixed.
‘When we started, I answered the phones in customer service and some of the stories we would hear really made me think, wow, this is genuinely changing people’s lives.’
He built that business into an international success across the whole of Africa, in the process, partnering with global outreach organisations such as the World Food Programme to use some of his influence to further improve people’s access to technology.
Then, in 2015, Philip and his family moved to the UK.
‘It was weird for me moving here,’ he says. ‘In South Africa, I’d never had a problem getting credit. I was lucky.
‘Then I get to the UK and I can’t open a bank account because I don’t have a credit history here and I can’t get a credit card because I don’t have a bank account. And I can’t get a mobile phone contract and so on. It was the first time ever I had personally experienced that financial exclusion we had helped to solve in Africa.’
It got him thinking. ‘What would I do if I needed to defer the cost of purchasing something big? I’d be…’ he trails off. ‘It’s nuts, right? And this is in a developed country – exactly the thing our technology in Africa is solving.’
Five years later, Zilch was born. Zilch allows consumers to build a credit score while not paying any charges. Instead, the retailer pays for them. If the retailer is not on Zilch, the customer pays a small flat fee of one or two pounds. ‘I think of it like buying on debit or deferred debit. It’s just fairer,’ says Philip.
Again, it’s the customer stories that keep him motivated. ‘We had this one lady whose mother was ill, she lived in Leeds, and this lady couldn’t pay the train fare in one go – it was hundreds of pounds. She used Zilch to spread the cost and she saw her mum.
‘She was calling to thank us. She said without Zilch she wouldn’t have been able to go and say goodbye to her mum, who sadly passed away the next week. These stories exist. It really, really matters to people that they have access to credit and it’s not outrageously expensive. It’s what makes it meaningful for me.’
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