“So how is it that we can make credit more equitable and affordable? The question hasn't changed, it is the answer that needs to change.”

In a traditional model, the end-to-end cost of consumer credit involves the merchant paying a commission to the credit card company for facilitating the payment, the consumer paying the credit card company fees and interest for maintaining a line of credit, and the merchant paying Google or Meta for presenting an ad to their audience. As a career credit guy, I’d only ever considered the first two, that in a low-risk segment where interest is lower then fees might compensate and vice versa. But that marketing spend is really the cornerstone, because people don’t borrow for borrowing’s sake, they borrow to purchase a thing or service.

“Now you can actually get in front of customers, and you know what they've bought in the past, you know what their affordability is, and you also know that they're spending in a sustainable way and that you, as a brand, are contributing to that sustainable commerce. And that's really where we think the sweet spot exists. Why don't we let brands rather pay our customers? In other words, use the brand's marketing budget to subsidise the cost of credit to our customer, and convince our customer to buy from that brand.”

Zilch is at home at https://www.zilch.com/uk/ (or find the app for Apple or Android )

Zilch is also on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/payzilch/ (plus Youtube, TikTok and Instagram with the PayZilch handle)

If you want to follow the work of StepChange, the Debt Charity that got a shout-out in the episode, they’re at https://www.stepchange.org/

You can learn more about myself, Brendan le Grange, on my LinkedIn page (feel free to connect), my action-adventure novels are on Amazon, some versions even for free, and my work with ConfirmU and our gamified psychometric scores is at https://confirmu.com/ and on episode 24 of this very show https://www.howtolendmoneytostrangers.show/episodes/episode-24

If you have any feedback, questions, or if you would like to participate in the show, please feel free to reach out to me via the contact page on this site.

Regards, Brendan

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