Zip Co Limited (ASX: ZIP), a digital financial services company, today announced it has selected Google Cloud to build an AI-Native Product Factory designed to transform how Zip creates, develops, tests, launches, and continuously improves new products and experiences in the U.S.

In financial services, new products still move like a relay race. Research hands off to design, design to engineering, and engineering to risk, legal, and compliance. Every handoff adds weeks, and every launch starts largely from scratch. Zip’s AI-Native Product Factory replaces that relay with a shared, governed agentic environment where teams work in parallel.

The initiative represents a shift from using AI to augment day-to day-work to reimagining the entire product-development lifecycle with Gemini Enterprise. Zip’s Product Factory will connect customer research, design, engineering, risk, legal, compliance, and customer experience through a shared, governed agentic environment. The strategic value of the Product Factory is designed to compound over time, enabling Zip to pursue multiple concepts simultaneously, shorten the time taken between insights and launch, and progressively lower the incremental cost and complexity of bringing new experiences to market.

“With Google Cloud and Gemini Enterprise, we’re creating a new operating model for what AI-native consumer financial services looks like in practice,” said Rory Herriman, U.S. chief technology and operating officer of Zip US. “The real power comes from combining AI with what is uniquely ours: our data, our understanding of our customers, our product and risk expertise, and the institutional knowledge we have built over time. The Product Factory turns that intelligence into a compounding advantage. Every product we build creates reusable intelligence and capabilities that make the next product faster and better. That is how we accelerate innovation at a scale that simply wasn’t possible before.”

Zip is working with Google Cloud to establish the agentic foundation that makes this possible. Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise will underpin the AI-Native Product Factory and Zip’s broader AI industrialization environment, where agents work alongside Zip employees across internal workflows. With access to frontier and open-weight AI models, Zip can apply the right intelligence to each opportunity while building on a common enterprise foundation.

“This isn’t just about changing how we build products. It’s about building an intelligence-driven enterprise, where our data, knowledge, and expertise continuously compound and can be applied across our products, decisions, and operations.” said Herriman.

That foundation is being designed for the realities of financial services from the outset. Security, governance, traceability, and human oversight are built into how agents access data, interact with systems, and execute work, allowing Zip to accelerate innovation while maintaining clear accountability. For Zip, speed and control are not competing objectives; building AI safely is what enables it to scale.

“Agentic commerce is changing the way consumers discover and purchase products, which requires a rewiring of how financial services are delivered so AI agents can interact at scale,” said Georgina Bulkeley, Managing Director, Global Financial Services Industries Lead, Google Cloud. “The financial companies that will win in this era will be the ones that are already using agents themselves. Zip recognises this and is building a company that will be ready for it, by embedding agentic intelligence from Gemini Enterprise right into its core operating model.”

Bringing agentic intelligence into the customer experience

Zip’s AI strategy extends beyond how products are built and how work gets done internally. Zip is also developing agentic experiences natively within its products, bringing the same growing body of data, knowledge, and intelligence directly into how the company serves its customers.

Zia, Zip’s customer-facing AI assistant, will be enabled by Gemini Enterprise, creating a common agentic foundation across Zip’s Product Factory, internal AI environment, and customer-facing experiences. As Zia evolves, specialized agents will be able to work together using a single, intuitive customer experience, drawing on Zip’s growing intelligence and capabilities to understand needs, take appropriate action, and resolve increasingly complex customer requests.

“What customers experience should become simpler as the intelligence behind it becomes more sophisticated,” said Herriman. “Zia is evolving from an AI support assistant toward an agentic experience embedded directly into our products. Customers won’t need to understand which agent, system, or team can solve their problem—they should simply be able to tell Zia what they need. Behind that experience, specialized agents, our people, and the intelligence we continue to build can work together to deliver the right outcome.”

Building from an established AI foundation

“The next competitive advantage in consumer finance will come from the ability to turn insights into trusted products faster than conventional operating models allow,” said Joe Heck, CEO of Zip U.S. “We believe product velocity will become one of the most important moats in our industry and we intend to make it one of ours.” “This is growth infrastructure,” Heck continued. “It gives our people the capacity to pursue more opportunities and serve more customers without adding complexity at the same rate. We are combining human judgement and ingenuity with the speed, scale, and intelligence of AI.”

Zip is also helping develop the external infrastructure required for an agentic economy. The company is a co-creator of the Unified Trust Layer, an open-source industry framework focused on making trust measurable and portable in AI-initiated commerce.

“Together, these initiatives address both sides of the agentic opportunity. This is the progression of our strategy from AI-Powered teams to AI-Native operations,’ Heck said. ‘We are building a company that can learn faster, create faster, and compound innovation with every product it launches.”

About Zip

Zip Co Limited (ACN 139 546 428) (ASX: ZIP) is a digital financial services company, offering innovative and people-centred products. Operating in two core markets, Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) and the United States (US), Zip offers access to point-of-sale credit and digital payment services, connecting millions of customers with its global network of tens of thousands of merchants.

Founded in Australia in 2013, Zip provides fair, flexible and transparent payment options, helping customers to take control of their financial future and helping merchants to grow their businesses.

For more information, visit: www.zip.co

About Google Cloud

Google Cloud offers a powerful, optimized AI stack — including AI infrastructure, leading models like Gemini, data management capabilities, multicloud security solutions, developer tools and platform, as well as agents and applications — that enables organizations to transform their business for the Agentic Era. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted technology partner.

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