Tide Bounce Back Loans / Update 2 / A letter to all members from Oliver, our CEO

Today our CEO, Oliver Prill, has written another open letter to all Tide members to update you on Bounce Back Loans.

Dear Tide members,

Following my letter on 22 May, I’d like to update you on how we’re delivering Bounce Back Loans to Tide members. Specifically, on how much we’ve lent through the scheme so far and what’s happening next.

The demand for these loans continues to be higher than we expected and I know the money can’t come soon enough for many of you. 

Loans are Government-backed not Government-funded

Most of you know that Bounce Back Loans are a support scheme established by the UK Government to help small businesses recover from the coronavirus interruption. 

The loans are 100% guaranteed by the Government. ‘Guaranteed’ means that if the lender doesn’t collect the loan, then the Government has to reimburse the lender. 

However, the loans aren’t funded by the Government. The Government doesn’t provide us with money to lend to borrowers. This affects how much we can lend. We – just like all accredited lenders – have to source the funds to lend as loans. 

Three weeks into issuing loans, we’ve optimised our processes and technology to allow us to issue loans much faster. At the moment, it’s the need to arrange funding that’s holding us back.

We’ve lent over £50 million – and there’s more to come

Since beginning to deliver loans through the Bounce Back Loan Scheme on 19 May 2020, to date (10 June), we’ve already lent just over £50 million as Bounce Back Loans – a significant amount for the size of our business. 

We’re now in discussions to raise hundreds of millions of pounds more. We hope to have this funding agreement in place soon and we’ll then be able to offer loans to many more of you.

We continue our efforts to raise the funding to lend through the scheme but, as we said when members signed up for the waiting list, unfortunately we can’t guarantee that every eligible business that joins our list will receive a Tide Bounce Back Loan.

We’ll keep you updated and, as we said in our previous communications, we encourage members to consider other options as well as a Bounce Back Loan from Tide.

Thank you to so many of you for being patient

We’re sorry it’s taking us longer than normal to respond to in-app messages. The volume of enquiries we’ve had has been higher than we expected.

To remedy this, Tideans from other teams volunteered to help and we’ve hired more people, trained them quickly and are restoring our service to a level you’d expect.

Thank you to all Tideans

Considering the size of our company and that Bounce Back Loans are a brand new innovation, I hope you’ll agree that what we’ve achieved so far is significant. 

I’d like to thank the entire Tide team for their commitment and energy. They’re working long hours, going above and beyond to support you. They’re doing their best at a time that’s also difficult for many of them personally. We won’t rest until we’ve offered loans to as many of you as we can. 

We stand with you,

Oliver

Oliver Prill, Tide CEO