Our coming of age

Milestones matter. They mark progress and the making of memories, the sorts of things we’re here for.

Today is a big day for us at Tide: a coming of age, though we’ve only been out in the world 15 months. We’re announcing a raft of new features, a new design, and a bigger persona. We’re entering adulthood – in a distinctly youthful way and with plenty more to come.

What’s a celebration without a card? Tide’s is now vertical, blue and radically simple. Read more about the re-imagined card experience here in a post by Caitlin, our Head of Design. Join Tide today and get your card in a few days.

Update your app or take a look at tide.co. Our new persona runs throughout. We want to liberate you from banking, admin and everything else you’d rather not do while you’re running your business. It’s a frustration we’ve heard from every Tide member we’ve ever spoken to and it’s why we’re helping you “Do less banking”.

Tide members really are doing less banking. The fastest account-opening we’ve seen at Tide is 2 minutes 14 seconds. Minutes, not months. The fastest we’ve sent a business credit, from first click to money in their account, is 6 minutes and 1 second. We believe this is the fastest business loan service in the world.

With the launch of Expense Cards, you can give to up to 35 colleagues a Tide card and track their spend from your app. When you’re finalising accounts and VAT payments, you can use our new Account Reader service to give your accountant read-only access to your transactions, saving you time otherwise spent downloading and attaching statements one by one.

Recording transactions is among the least rewarding activities in a business owner’s month. We’re delighted to eliminate that pain through an integration with FreeAgent. Collaborations like this save Tide members time, month in, month out – and there are more to come.

Multi-currency accounts and international payments are also on the way: we’re testing them with a few members right now. The feedback is positive and we’re confident we can bring real innovation to this area.

We’ve even marked our coming of age by getting a “driving licence”: authorisation as an electronic money institution (EMI) from the FCA. This gives us the option to access the same banking infrastructure as older banks.

We’ve come a long way since we launched last January. Within a year, 1 in 12 business bank accounts opened in the UK was with Tide. Right now more than 30,000 businesses are Tide members.

Tide has grown and learned quickly. Thank you for your support so far. Now, we’re ready to go bigger. And keep making good on our promise – to help you do less banking, and more of what you love.

George Bevis, Founder & CEO