Zilch raises USD 80 mln for its buy now, pay later service

According to TechCrunch, the funding is coming from Gauss Ventures and M&F Fund, among other unnamed investors. Furthermore, Zilch' BNPL solution doesn’t charge fees on its service, and instead makes a cut in the transaction from the retailer (part of the fee retailers pay to card companies in card transactions: the deals are all predicated on the idea that these alternatives to paying everything up front increases conversions, and that ‘convenience’ is what retailers are paying to have as an option). 

Therefore, its approach is pretty straightforward, offering instalments for paying back that start with 25% up front and paying for the item in full in 25% instalments over 6 weeks. Users who miss a payment are stopped from using the service again until this gets cleared but Zilch doesn’t charge late fees. The prospect of bypassing the retailer means that Zilch has been able to scale by making its service more applicable to more payment scenarios.

Furthermore, Zilch users have access to a card, which they can in turn use to also shop using BNPL in brick-and-mortar stores. Tap and Pay-over-time, as it’s called, means users can integrate the card number into a digital wallet to and use it as they would their handsets to pay with Apple or Android-based payment schemes. The company stated it’s the first BNPL do make this leap, TechCrunch reported.