Zilch delivers a faster, smarter storefront with Contentstack
EMEA’s fastest-growing tech unicorn has increased customer interactions and optimized retailer visibility to boost affiliate and ad revenues.

Zilch wanted to improve customer engagement and revenue opportunities through an always-relevant in-app storefront. By adopting Contentstack’s headless CMS, Zilch implemented intelligent workflows for creating, approving and publishing content, reducing the time it takes to launch new placements to the app to minutes.
The challenge
Zilch is one of the UK’s fastest-growing and most awarded fintechs. Launched in 2020 with a vision to eliminate the high cost of consumer credit for good, Zilch is pioneering Ad-Enabled Payments - a new global category transforming advertising spend into free, rewarding credit. As a Financial Media Network, Zilch seamlessly merges debit, credit, and savings into a single platform, allowing customers to earn rewards like up to 5% cashback or benefit from interest-free instalments when they pay online or in-store, anywhere in the world.
Instead of relying on costly, interest-based models, Zilch uses advertising spend to provide free and affordable credit. Ubiquitous, regulated, and powered by AI, Zilch is making credit more accessible and affordable than ever before. Zilch has a number of digital touchpoints, with the main customer journey taking place via the Zilch mobile app. The Zilch storefront is the main landing screen of the app, and the most crucial touchpoint for ensuring customer engagement and retailer visibility.
Prior to moving to a headless CMS, Zilch operated with multiple systems and processes for curating its content and storefront. Moving to a headless CMS streamlined operations, enabling greater flexibility and scalability.“One of the key pillars of our business is subsidizing the cost of credit for customers with ad revenue,” said Zachary Barclay, Zilch’s Product Manager for Merchant. “We were looking for ways to create advertiser tenancy within the customer experience, such as surfacing promotional placements so that when a customer transacts and comes back, we can show them other retailers to inspire them.”
The solution
After an in-depth vendor assessment process, Zilch's digital experience team chose Contentstack’s headless CMS due to its intuitive editor experience, support for a wide range of content types including video content, and the level of control Zilch could maintain over the presentation layer. Zilch was also impressed by a strong level of support from the Contentstack team. With a seamless implementation experience, Zilch was able to go live in just three months.
“Contentstack has been a great partner, from the sales process to ongoing support,” Barclay said. “We had a personalized demo that helped us visualize how Contentstack could fit our use cases, alongside architecture sessions which enabled a smooth and fast integration with our existing systems and custom solutions where needed. Post-implementation, Contentstack’s helpdesk response times are rapid, and their Customer Success team’s expertise ensures issues are resolved efficiently.”
By leveraging Contentstack on AWS to streamline content deployment and management for its mobile-first digital experience, Zilch is now able to curate its storefront experience in real time, adjusting quickly for key retailers to serve customer needs and market demands.

Contentstack has transformed the way Zilch manages content. “I can see that the more components we integrate with Contentstack and the more assets on the page that are powered by Contentstack, the faster we can deploy content,” Barclay said. One standout feature for Barclay and his team has been Contentstack Workflows, streamlining the process of content creation, review, approval, and publication, and supporting Zilch in managing the flow of content throughout its lifecycle.
“We now have a really effective pipeline where content can be written up quickly, get approved and published, all alongside smart approvals processes and deployment to staging and test environments to catch bugs before they go to production,” Barclay said. “It now takes only a few minutes to publish content to the app.”
The ability to quickly add new content types has eliminated the need for hard-coded content, empowering editors. Multiple teams at Zilch work in Contentstack, including Marketing and Sales. These teams can now develop content on their own, without needing to involve engineers. Built-in content environments allow editors to preview updates seamlessly within the Zilch app, and versioning and auditing tools provide transparency and a clear record of all changes. Zilch has found Contentstack to be a powerful enabler to drive customer engagement. The volume of traffic to their storefront has increased due to increased app initiations and the ability to deploy highly relevant content to visitors. Contentstack has also allowed Zilch to create new kinds of content, for example the newly launched Zilch Stories, which allow retailers to showcase their brand in a more compelling way, through video.
“Contentstack has enabled us to surface completely new types of content customers can engage with,” Barclay said. “We can sell that content as tenancy to our retail partners, as well as benefit from the incremental B2C revenue from subsidizing credit through new types of content experiences.”
The results
Today, the storefront is the heart of the Zilch experience. Moving forward, Zilch plans to use Contentstack’s personalization tools to tailor experiences for each user, so that the storefront shows them content based on their previous behaviors and interests.
Key wins for Zilch with Contentstack include:
- Revenue generation: The storefront is crucial for the app’s success, and Contentstack is used to power retailer placements and curate content.
- Operational efficiency: A reduction in engineering, marketing and sales overhead means multiple teams can focus on more impactful initiatives.
- Faster time-to-market: With clear workflows in place, Zilch can now update its storefront in minutes.
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About
Launched in 2020, Zilch is one of the UK’s fastest-growing and most awarded fintechs, pioneering Ad-Enabled Payments - a new global category that transforms advertising spend into free, rewarding credit. As a regulated Financial Media Network powered by AI, Zilch merges credit, debit, and savings into a single platform, enabling customers to earn up to 5% cashback or split payments interest-free, online or in-store.
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