Buy-now pay-later firm Zilch raises £100m debt ahead of hotly-anticipated public listing
London fintech Zilch has raised £100m in securitised debt financing in a deal arranged by Deutsche Bank ahead of a hotly-anticipated public listing.
The payments firm, founded in 2018 and valued at $2bn (£1.65bn) last October, said it would use the money to develop new products for a broader base of customers.
Zilch is one of the UK’s largest buy-now pay-later (BNPL) providers, competing with the likes of Klarna and Clearpay. It offers a card allowing consumers to pay via debit or credit which can be paid off in interest-free instalments, rather than a “checkout button” like many other BNPL firms.
“With this new securitisation, we’re poised to triple sales volumes and achieve significant capital efficiencies as we continue to drive billions in commerce to our retail network and, in turn, hundreds of millions in savings and subsidies to our customer base,” co-founder and chief executive Philip Belamant said on Wednesday.
The company now has more than 4m customers and processes over 10m monthly payments. Belamant told Morning Wire last month that Zilch expected to hit bottom-line profitability “soon”.
He added that Zilch was planning to launch a stock market listing “within next year or around that mark” but had yet to decide on a location. A London float would come as a major boost to the capital’s beleaguered bourse, which has struggled to attract big-ticket tech listings in recent years.
Zilch has held talks with the Nasdaq, New York Stock Exchange and London Stock Exchange. Belamant himself is a co-chair of trade body Innovate Finance’s “Unicorn Council”, which has made a series of policy recommendations for the UK government to make London a more attractive place for fintech IPOs.
Chief financial officer Hugh Courtney said on Wednesday that the new securitisation represented “a major milestone as we work towards an IPO in the future”.