Zip selects Quantium to design the operating model behind its AI-Native Product Factory
Quantium to work alongside Zip’s US team to redesign how the company develops and launches products in an agentic environment.
Zip, a digital financial services company, has selected Quantium to design and execute the operating model behind its AI-Native Product Factory in the United States. Announced this month and built on Google Cloud with Gemini Enterprise, the Product Factory is the environment in which Zip’s next generation of products will be built, with Zip’s teams directing and reviewing the work, and AI agents producing it.
Financial services have never been short of ideas. What it has lacked is a way of bringing them to customers at pace. A new product moves from research to design, through engineering, and on to risk, legal and compliance, each team waiting on the one before it, so customers wait months for products their providers conceived long before they could build them safely. The industry’s answer so far has been to give each of those teams AI, which quickens individual stages without accelerating the process as a whole.
The Product Factory rewrites how a product travels from an idea to a customer, with the work of every discipline happening simultaneously rather than in sequence. Agents generate the software, and the controls of a regulated business are built into the environment rather than applied at the end. Zip can pursue several ideas at once, move from insight to launch in a fraction of the time, and lower the cost of every product that follows, as the intelligence and capability built for one becomes available to the next.
“Anyone who has run a product business knows the hardest part is never the idea. It is the months that idea spent moving between research, design, engineering, risk, legal and compliance, one team at a time,” said Brian Hartzer, Group Executive for Financial Services at Quantium. “Most companies have used AI to speed up each of those stages. Zip has redesigned the path itself, with risk and compliance in the room from the first day. It changes what Zip can get to market, and how quickly, without giving up any of the rigour its customers and regulators expect.”
Quantium designs how the Product Factory works and builds it with Zip’s team on the Google Cloud platform and models underpinning it, creating an asset Zip will own and operate. In the first phase, Quantium will build Zip’s agentic software factory, including the controls, testing and audit trail that let AI agents build software safely inside a regulated business. Redesigning how a lending business develops products calls for an understanding of how that business runs end to end.
“The Product Factory is the next step in becoming an AI-native business. We know our platform and our customers deeply, and we wanted to build it with people who understand how lending works across the industry and have already built with AI agents in practice. Quantium’s team brings both, and they’re working alongside ours to deliver it,” said Rory Herriman, U.S. chief technology and operating officer of Zip US.
Quantium is one of a small group of AI-native partners recognised by Google Cloud globally, and the only one in Asia Pacific.