Providing financial security for our members – Unsupported Business Models

As a financial services provider with more than 300,000 business customers and counting, we take safety and security very seriously.

Not just how we manage and protect our members’ funds, but also our broader responsibility to ensure Tide current accounts are used by genuine businesses and not for criminal activity.

That’s why we carry out what are called know your customer checks before we open every account. This helps us to be confident we understand what every member’s business does and how it makes money.

As part of this commitment, we review and update our account opening criteria on an ongoing basis.

We’re on a mission to help businesses owners spend less time on money admin, and we want to enable as many small businesses as possible to do that.

But it’s a balancing act: we can’t take on too many accounts that are in high risk industries as that means we’re not able to focus our time and energy on the rest of our members.

As a result and going forwards, we will not be offering business bank accounts to businesses in the following industries:

• The holding, managing an/or controlling of a third party’s (client’s/customer’s) funds in the Tide account. This includes using the funds on behalf of other individuals
• Insurance companies (incl. insurance brokers)
• Trading of crypto/virtual currencies
• Operating as a pawnbroker
• Extraction of precious metals and stones
• Investments (incl. real estate investments)
• Money services (such as foreign exchange, loan providers, money transfers)
• Banking services (incl. BCAs, loans, digital wallets, etc.)
• Casinos, prize draws and other betting or gambling activities
• Sale of unlicensed pharmaceuticals
• Sale or trade of cannabidiol (CBD) products
• Trading of weapons, explosives or armaments
• Unlicensed trading and processing of scrap metal
• Unlicensed waste management
• Unlicensed animal breeding
• Sale, import and export of used vehicles or heavy machinery
• Escort services and other services in the adult industry
• Bidding fee auctions
• Non-profit organizations, including charities
• Operating as, but not limited to, CICs and CIOs, PLC, LLP, Partnership, Trust.

We appreciate that this won’t be good news for some prospective and a very small number of existing Tide members.

But we want to be 100% confident that we can offer a great service to all members who we work with.

That also means that we need to be confident where payments are coming from and being made to.

If you have any questions or comments on this post, or any other aspect of our business and how we work, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line at hello@tide.co