A man who had built payment companies on two continents could not get a credit card.
Philip Belamant moved to London in 2015. On paper he was a fintech founder. In the eyes of UK lenders he was nobody: no credit history, no score, no file. A Times headline captured the sting: he had founded a unicorn but could not get a credit card.
Moola Mobile, begun in Namibia, let people earn airtime by watching adverts, and reached Botswana and Nigeria.
He grew up in Johannesburg, the son of Serge Belamant, an engineer born in Tulle, France, who had arrived in South Africa at 14 and went on to build payment systems. Philip studied IT at Rand Afrikaans University, finishing with a BSc and an honours degree. While still a student he was experimenting with mobile solutions for people the banks ignored.
He started early. His prepaid and virtual card company PBel ran from 2006 to 2012. Moola Mobile, begun in Namibia, let people earn airtime by watching adverts, and reached Botswana and Nigeria. Later he ran Net1 Mobile Solutions. Each one was a different answer to the same problem: how do you serve people who do not fit a lender's boxes?
What almost nobody saw coming was that London would hand him that problem personally. Out of the frustration came Zilch, founded in 2018 with his father as chairman and Sean O'Connor as co-founder. The idea was to make credit work without charging shoppers interest, with merchants paying instead. The FCA took it into its Regulatory Sandbox in 2019, and the app opened to UK consumers in September 2020.
Growth was quick and expensive. A GBP 83M Series B from Goldman Sachs and DMG Ventures came in 2021, then a Series C led by Ventura Capital and Gauss Ventures that took the valuation to $2bn that November. A US push followed in Miami in 2022, and in March 2024 the company paused it to chase profit.
That bet paid off. By September 2024 Zilch said it was profitable on a $130M annual run rate, and by November 2025 it counted more than 5.3 million customers, had raised over $175M led by KKCG, and had become Arsenal's official way to pay.
The lesson is uncomfortable and useful. Belamant did not find his company in a market report. He found it at a lender's counter, being told he did not exist. The best problems for a founder are often the ones that happen to them first.