Success in 2023 and a look ahead to 2024: a letter from our CEO

2023 has been another year of considerable progress at Tide. As we go into 2024, we’re cementing our position as the UK’s leading business financial platform with a growing presence in India. Our success is due to a determined focus on diversifying and scaling our product, keeping our members at the heart of what we do, and driving success in internationalisation. 

Looking back, I’m extremely proud and grateful for what we’ve achieved, particularly in the face of strong macroeconomic headwinds, and anticipate another year of exciting developments. 

UK – 10% market share

Tide has continued to grow at pace, both in member numbers and our revenue. In September, we announced that Tide served one in 10 of all UK small businesses – this equates to more than 550,000 members in all sectors and industries across the country.  Our incredible growth has been made possible by more than 1,600 dedicated, hard-working Tideans largely in the UK, India and Bulgaria.

Relentless focus on product

We are passionate about saving businesses time and money, and helping them with their finance and admin, so they can focus on the things they love. We won’t ever stop looking to evolve and create new products to help our members – allowing for seamless connections between different financial and accounting services, removing the pain points of running a small business, and simply making business banking easier. 

In the UK in 2023, we launched two major new product lines:

• Tide Accounting: accrual-based accounting embedded in a bank account. We are the first fintech in the UK to offer such a service  
• Tide Acquiring: seamlessly integrating Card Readers (PoS) and Payment Links with Tide Bank Account and Tide Accounting

Acquisition

Securing finance is a big issue for small businesses, especially in the current economic climate. We completed our first-ever acquisition in 2023 with this in mind. In February, we received regulatory approval from the FCA to acquire Funding Options, the UK’s leading business credit marketplace. Adding Funding Options sped up the rollout of Tide’s credit offering, giving us access to over 120 lenders. Funding Options is now fully integrated with Tide and progressing well. 

We will look at other potential deals, similar to Funding Options, if they enrich the services and products we offer our members. We expect to be a sector leader in the fintech merger and acquisition space.

Senior hires: expanding the leadership to drive scale

We’ve made a number of senior hires this year, as we pursue our strategy of diversifying and internationalising product and reach. We appointed Vinay Ramani as our first Chief Product Officer, Frances Ibe as SVP Experience Foundations, Scott Donnelly as VP Credit Services and Justin Drees as VP in Business Services. Formerly of Meta, Ramani is driving our global product strategy vision and broadening our small business-focused offering in the UK and India.

2024

We will roll out a raft of products and services next year and beyond. As always, our focus is on a  high level of connectivity between products to save our members time. We will provide details of these as soon as we can. What I can say is that we are accelerating the development of Tide’s savings and investment proposition as we clearly see the growing demand for deposit-based accounts, thanks to robust and sustained interest rates in the UK. 

Generative AI

We are constantly looking to improve our platform and our member experience. We already have sizable data teams and are deploying Machine Learning at scale. We have embraced research and development in generative AI – and are excited about the first proof-of-concepts being internally released.

Internationalisation

We’re growing rapidly in India, where Tide has been available for 12 months. We’ve already welcomed around more than 175,000 members since launch. 

We now have several hundred Tideans in India, based largely in our technology centre in Hyderabad, and our business centre in Delhi. Many of our global roles are now based in India.

We aren’t stopping with India, either – we will announce the next stage of Tide’s international expansion next year.

APP Fraud

Our products and services will only flourish if our customers feel safe and secure using them. Like everyone in the UK financial services industry, we have been alarmed by escalating rates of fraud – often from scams that originate from social media and the telecoms sector.  

To avoid providing incentives to criminals from around the globe, we have cautioned against the PSR mandatory reimbursement regime set to come into force later in 2024 and made a number of proposals to tackle the problem at source. Across Tide, we are investing huge resources to improve our systems, including monitoring, and adding technology that better helps detect and prevent fraud. We work with partners across the industry and in Government to combat fraud, and earlier this year, we joined Stop Scams UK to provide even more assistance to members through a dedicated fraud line. 

Net zero

We also want to support the wider community. One of my proudest moments from this year was when we announced our net zero strategy. You can read more about our net zero plan and pledges. Earlier this year, Tide became the first fintech to remove 100% of emissions using carbon removals, from a starting point of 2022. 

In 2024, we’ll do even more by fulfilling Pledge 3, where we have committed to making net zero simpler for our members.

Women in Business

We announced our plans to help 200,000 female-led businesses in the UK start out by the end of 2027. In a survey to our members, more than half (53%) of women in the UK said they find it challenging to start their own business. We’ve launched a Women in Business content series to inspire, inform, and champion female Tide members. Tide was the first fintech to support female-led SMEs at scale, and in February we announced that we had already onboarded 100,000 female-led businesses – 10 months ahead of our 2023 end-of-year target. Our new commitment forms part of Tide’s efforts to promote gender equality and remove barriers to female entrepreneurship. This is our aim not just in the UK, but also in India, where we plan to onboard 500,000 women-led businesses by 2027. In sum, we will throw efforts behind bringing 700,000 women to Tide by the end of 2027.

Tideans: OneTeam to make it happen

We’re proud to have grown our employee numbers to 1,600 and to see so many thrive at Tide. In India, we were recognised as a great place to work by the Great Place to Work Institute, with more than 83% of employees reporting a positive work experience and company culture.

After a successful 2023, we are looking forward to the new year with excitement. We will continue to grow by putting our members first, and by delivering the products and services that truly support their businesses.

Oliver Prill

CEO, Tide

[1] UK National Statistics: 5.47m small businesses in the UK