When can I get a Bounce Back loan from Tide?


Last updated: 29 March 2021

Update: The Bounce Back Loan Scheme is closed for new applications from 31 March 2021. For more information, please visit the British Business Bank website. If you have any questions about a Bounce Back Loan taken out with Tide, please contact the Member Support team in your Tide app.

By Oliver Prill, CEO of Tide

We’re delighted to announce that we’re now offering Bounce Back Loans!

Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced the Bounce Back Loan Scheme on 27 April 2020. The Scheme allows small business owners to quickly borrow from £2,000 to 25% of their annual turnover with generous terms. You can read more about the Scheme in our previous blog post.

Can you get a Bounce Back loan from Tide?

Update: The Bounce Back Loan Scheme is closed for new applications from 31 March 2021. For more information, please visit the British Business Bank website. If you have any questions about a Bounce Back Loan taken out with Tide, please contact the Member Support team in your Tide app.

Why did it take Tide a while to start delivering Bounce Back loans?

Both the Bounce Back Loan Scheme and the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme are only available through lenders accredited by the British Business Bank. The Bank’s accredited lenders are mostly high-street banks and it’s those lenders who deliver the loans to applicants, collect repayments and so on.

When the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme was announced, we immediately contacted the British Business Bank to express our interest in becoming an accredited lender to deliver this support to our members.

The Bank originally said that the loans would only be delivered by their existing accredited lenders. Many organisations, including Tide, publicly highlighted that this would mean many small businesses wouldn’t have access to the loans, due to the market share held by current list of accredited lenders. 

We successfully persuaded the Government and the British Business Bank to accredit new lenders to help deliver the Business Interruption loans to the largest possible reach. And we continued to pursue our application to become an accredited lender. 

Since then, the British Business Bank announced that they were overwhelmed by applications from lenders wanting to be accredited, and they haven’t been able to process them all as fast as they’d hoped. Adding to this, we didn’t know the timeline for accreditation because the Bank wasn’t been clear about how they prioritise accrediting new lenders.

We actively pursued our application for several weeks and when the Bounce Back Loan Scheme was announced, we transferred our application to this scheme instead. This is because we believe the Bounce Back Loan Scheme is more appropriate for our members.

We immediately answered questions the British Business Bank asked us and we did everything we could to become accredited as fast as possible. We finally received accreditation on 14 May 2020.

To our members who emailed their MPs to ask for support for our application – thank you very much.

Read more

Find out what other Government support your business might be eligible for with our checker:
Tide | COVID-19 Eligibility Check

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Photo by Bill Oxford on Unsplash

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