Zood: reviving the Silk Road

By Laurent Sciboz

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Biography

Laurent Sciboz is the chief investment officer and a board member at ZOOD’s parent company OrientSwiss SA. He previously held roles at UBS, Rothschild, ING Bank and PARfinance.

ZOOD is a digital lending platform driving financial inclusion by providing flexible payment methods to individuals/SMEs in Uzbekistan, Pakistan and Lebanon. Headquartered in Switzerland, ZOOD has over 10 million users (6 million in Uzbekistan). 

The company’s services make up an ecosystem engulfing fintech (ZOOD Pay), e-commerce (ZOOD Mall) and e-logistics services (ZOOD Ship operated by Fargo). 

Since inception, ZOOD has raised over $80m.

This interview was conducted and transcribed by Timothy Motte.

In Uzbekistan, you launched the marketplace before any fintech products. Why?

Our goal is to provide credit for the masses. In countries like Uzbekistan, the lack of credit histories, coupled with inefficient capital distribution by local banks, foster low credit penetration. Before offering local credit, we had to build up local credit histories.

A good way to do so was to build an e-commerce marketplace, which, opportunistically, Uzbekistan lacked when we launched. 

The marketplace allows us to aggregate consumers and merchants while gathering valuable data on both. Marketplace consumers can purchase items using interest-free Buy-Now-Pay-Later (BNPL), akin to a product-based loan. Their repayment patterns enable us to credit score them and usher them into interest-bearing, longer-term loans. Today, interest-bearing loans constitute the vast majority of our loan portfolio. 

We aren’t an e-commerce platform. We’re building an ecosystem geared towards lending products for the vast majority of consumers traditional banks don’t want to serve. Adjacent ventures, such as the marketplace, fuel our consumer acquisition and refine our credit scoring processes. 

What existing companies are you modeled after?