Receivables Financing for Small Businesses with Blockchain with Zach Marks of Jia

The Green Room | Fintech Journeys in Asia

In this episode, I speak with Zach Marks, co-founder and CEO of Jia, a fintech leveraging blockchain for receivables financing for businesses in Kenya and the Philippines.

Zach has spent his career working in emerging markets, beginning with teaching English in India after college to development consulting in South Sudan. After building and selling his first tech company, an online jobs marketplace, Zach got into fintech when he joined Tala. He spent more than 5 years building and expanding Tala’s consumer lending products across 4 continents, after which he decided to take these skills to small business lending.

Jia helps businesses finance their receivables to access more capital and smooth their cash flows. Jia was founded in early 2023 and has launched operations in Kenya and the Philippines, with plans to scale across emerging markets. Jia has used web3 platforms like Huma to tokenize their loan book and create a pathway for cryptocurrency and stablecoins to be invested in emerging market businesses as an alternative asset class. You can learn more about Jia by visiting jia.xyz.