Bounce Back Loans

The ‘Bounce Back Loan Scheme’ is a new support scheme from the Government, adding to the existing support for small businesses affected by coronavirus.

You can borrow from £2,000 up to 25% of your annual turnover, up to a maximum of £50,000 for up to six years.

For the first 12 months, you won’t pay any interest because the Government will pay it for you. You also won’t have to make any repayments in the first 12 months. There are no fees on a Bounce Back Loan – unlike other loans, you won’t pay fees to arrange the loan, to repay it early or if your repayments are overdue.

For the rest of the term of the loans, you’ll pay interest at 2.5% per year.

Bounce Back Loans are delivered only by lenders accredited by the British Business Bank. The Government provides a 100% guarantee to lenders for all eligible Bounce Back Loans, but you remain liable for all the repayments, as well as the interest after the first year.

The Bounce Back Loan Scheme is separate from but similar to the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme. Both loan schemes lend money to businesses via lenders accredited by the British Business Bank.

Small businesses can be eligible for both schemes but the Government launched the Bounce Back Loan Scheme to help small businesses borrow smaller amounts more quickly, and with more generous terms.

Read more from the British Business Bank:What is the difference between CBILS and the Bounce Back Loan Scheme?

If your business is already getting a Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan of more than £50,000, you’re not eligible for the Bounce Back Loan Scheme.

However, if your Business Interruption Loan is for £50,000 or less, you may take out a Bounce Back Loan and use the money to repay your Business Interruption Loan, as long as the money you get from the Bounce Back Loan is enough to pay back the other loan in full.

You may not hold both a Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan and a Bounce Back Loan.

We’re offering loans under the Government’s Bounce Back Loan Scheme. Find out if you match the eligibility criteria here: Bounce Back Loans: Are you eligible?

For the first 12 months, there’s no interest to pay and you won’t have to make any repayments. After that, the interest rate is fixed at 2.5% p.a.

If you’re interested in getting a Bounce Back Loan from us, please register your interest.

We’ll email you to confirm we’ve added you to our list. If or when you can access a Bounce Back Loan from us, we’ll message you again by email or app notification.

To receive the money you must confirm that you’re eligible by signing the declaration and activating your offer. From there, you’ll have six months to withdraw a single amount up to your approved limit.

Important: the maximum you can borrow is 25% of your annual turnover in 2019

If your business was established after 1 January 2019, you should apply the 25% limit to your estimated annual turnover from the date you started your business.

You may only withdraw once. The money will go into your main Tide account straight away.

In your Tide app, you’ll be able to see the details of your Bounce Back Loan, including the date of your first repayment.

We’re delivering Bounce Back Loans from the week commencing Monday 18 May 2020, with a phased approach. This means we’re giving access to businesses in batches.

We aim to deliver these loans to as many eligible members as possible but because we’re expecting a high demand, we can’t guarantee that everyone who joins the waiting list will be able to access Tide Bounce Back Loans.

Did you already register your interest? If not, please join our waiting list.

If you’ve already joined our waiting list, when you can access a Bounce Back Loan from us, we’ll send you an email or app notification to let you know that your offer is ready and what you need to do to take up the offer.

• If you’re already a Tide member…
  Because you already have an account with us, we already have information about you and your company which we can use to give you access to a Tide Bounce Back Loan.
• If you’re not already a Tide member…
  You’ll need to create a free Tide account to receive the money and manage the repayments, but you won’t need to switch your business bank account to Tide. We’ll use the information you give us in the application process to decide whether we can give you access to a Tide Bounce Back Loan.

If we need more information or documents from you before we can give you access to a Bounce Back Loan, we’ll be in touch.

If we give you access to a Tide Bounce Back Loan, you’ll have to successfully complete a self-declaration form confirming your eligibility and accept our Bounce Back Loan Terms and Conditions before you can withdraw the funds.

Read more: FAQ: Is my business eligible for the Bounce Back Loan Scheme?

Like all Bounce Back Loans, you won’t pay any interest for the first 12 months because the Government will pay it for you.

After that, the interest rate is fixed at 2.5% p.a.

You can borrow from £2,000 up to 25% of your annual turnover in 2019, up to maximum of £50,000.

If your business was established after 1 January 2019, you should apply the 25% limit to your estimated annual turnover from the date you started your business.

Your Bounce Back Loan amount will be based on your estimated annual turnover for 2020 which we’ll ask you to provide before you accept Tide’s Bounce Back Loan Terms and Conditions and withdraw the funds.

The maximum you can borrow will be 25% of your estimated annual turnover for 2020, up to £50,000.

The maximum you can borrow as a Bounce Back Loan is 25% of your annual turnover in 2019, up to a maximum of £50,000.

If you need more than this, you could apply for a Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan.

Remember, you may only hold one Bounce Back Loan, and with only one lender, and you aren’t allowed to have both a Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan and a Bounce Back Loan.

When you activate your offer, you then have six months to withdraw. And remember, you can only withdraw once.

You’re eligible for a Bounce Back Loan if your business:

• is based in the UK
• was established on or before 1 March 2020
• has been negatively affected by coronavirus
• earns 50% or more of its income from trading
• will use the loan money as working capital or to invest in your business

If your business was an ‘undertaking in difficulty’…
You’re eligible if you certify that taking out a Bounce Back Loan won’t breach state aid rules and that you won’t use the loan for export-related activities.

• If you tell us your business was an ‘undertaking in difficulty’, we’ll ask you to fill in this form about State Aid and send it to our Member Support team.
• Not sure if your business was an ‘undertaking in difficulty’? Use this questionnaire to find out.

You aren’t eligible if your business is:

• a bank, insurer or reinsurer
  (but insurance brokers are eligible)
• a public-sector body
• a state-funded primary or secondary school
• going through a bankruptcy, debt restructuring or liquidation
• receiving or has applied for a Bounce Back Loan from another lender
• already getting a loan from the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme.
  However, you can take out a Bounce Back Loan and use the money to repay the Business Interruption Loan in full.

To find out if you can access a Bounce Back Loan from Tide, open your Tide app and go to More > Credit > Bounce Back Loan 

If you’re interested in taking out a Bounce Back Loan with us and you don’t see it in your app, please join our waiting list.

Yes – we’re working on this right now. We know this is important so you can make alternative plans if you need to. In the next two weeks, we’ll begin emailing members if we won’t be able to offer a Bounce Back Loan.

When we launched our Bounce Back Loans, we said that after you registered your interest, you’d get a notification if we were ‘pre-approving’ you for a loan. We decided this was confusing – it’s a phrase we use internally at Tide but it’s not a normal expression that makes sense to everyone – so we stopped using it.

‘Pre-approved’ just means that based on the information we already have about you, we can offer you a loan subject to you successfully completing  the self-certification questions. It’s as straightforward as that. If we need any extra information from you, we’ll be in touch.

Bounce Back Loans from all lenders are self-certifiable – you have to confirm your eligibility for the loan, for example by confirming that your business has been negatively affected by coronavirus.

Yes, we’re considering limited companies and sole traders for Bounce Back Loans.

No – you won’t be asked to sign a personal guarantee on a Bounce Back Loan. 

The Government guarantees 100% of your loan with your lender, but you remain liable for all the repayments, as well as the interest after the first year.

No, you don’t need to activate your Tide card to be eligible for a Bounce Back Loan from us.

No. You may only hold one Bounce Back Loan, and with only one lender.

It isn’t possible to ‘top up’ a Bounce Back Loan with more money.

You can only take out one Bounce Back Loan.

If you’re currently in the process of applying for a Bounce Back Loan with another lender or if you have received a Bounce Back Loan, you should not register your interest in a Bounce Back Loan from Tide.

If you withdraw your application for a Bounce Back Loan with another lender or if you’re rejected, then you’re welcome to register for our waiting list.

No. Government rules state that you may only have one Bounce Back Loan. This is one per person or one per group.

So if you own more than one company (a group), you can only take out one Bounce Back Loan for the whole group.

Two companies form a ‘group’ when:

• one company is a subsidiary of the other, or
• both companies are subsidiaries of a third company (all three are then ‘a group’), or
• the same person has a controlling interest (for example,51% shares) in both companies.

Yes, it’s possible to have both a Flexible Balance and a Bounce Back Loan with us.

To find out if you can access a Bounce Back Loan from Tide, open your Tide app and go to More > Credit > Bounce Back Loan

If you don’t see Bounce Back Loan in your app, please join our waiting list.

We want to let you know exactly when you can expect to get a Bounce Back Loan from us. So far we haven’t been able to predict dates because offering these loans is completely new to us and there are many variables. Instead of disappointing you, we asked you to wait.

We know you need more certainty, but as with all other lenders, getting a Bounce Back Loan  depends on a number of factors. These include:

• Government rules on eligibility
• checks including anti-fraud and Know Your Customer (KYC)
• limits on lending set by the British Business Bank
• raising money to finance the loans

When you look at this process as a whole, it isn’t as simple as flicking a switch. The Tide team is working round the clock to align these factors to offer loans to as many of you as possible, as fast as possible.

Because of these factors, we can’t guarantee that we’ll be able to offer a Bounce Back Loan to everyone on our waiting list. We stated this on the webpage where you registered your interest.

If you need a loan and can’t wait, you can also apply or join waiting lists with other lenders. This is because you don’t ‘apply’ for a Bounce Back Loan with Tide, you join our waiting list. (Remember, you can only have one Bounce Back Loan.)

As with all new features, we need to make sure we scale effectively and offer the best experience for our members to access the loans. As always, we beta-launched with a select number of limited companies who had been a member of Tide for a while, before making the loans available more widely.

The first batch received offers of Bounce Back Loans from us on 19 May. Since going live, we’ve been learning and improving our Bounce Back Loans and getting ready to ramp up.

We’re now working through our waiting list as quickly as we can. Unfortunately, we still can’t guarantee everyone who registers will be able to get a loan from us but we’re working hard to make the loans available to as many of you as possible, as well as providing more clarity on timelines. We believe that over the upcoming days and weeks we will be able to issue substantial volumes of Bounce Back Loans to our members.

We understand that there are concerns around sole traders accessing Bounce Back Loans. Recent legal changes mean that we’re now allowed to lend to sole traders and we’re working to make these loans available to our sole trader members as soon as possible.

The waiting list works like a queue, everyone who registers is listed in the order you signed up. We’re working hard to get through the list as fast as we can and we’ll contact you when you can access a Bounce Back Loan.  We’ll also let you know if you’re not eligible.

We’re building an online tracker so you’ll be able to easily review your status. We need to build and test this tracker system and we hope it will be live before mid June.

We’ve been letting people know their place on the list, however this is a manual short-term solution and many members have been asking for daily updates. This is causing delays in our response times and leaving members frustrated that we’re not going as fast as they’d like. You’ll soon be able to check your status with our tracker so it would be helpful if you could support us by messaging only with queries about using your Tide account or withdrawing your loan when we’ve offered one to you.

After we launched the registration page on our website, we emailed all Tide members to let them know. Within the first day we had more than 15,000 registrations, so if you signed up on the first day or two, that’s why there are thousands of people ahead of you in the queue.

In the first few days we were able to offer Bounce Back Loans, we beta-tested them just as we’d do with any new feature or product. We did this by offering loans to a small group made up of a selection of limited companies who are long-standing Tide members. Testing was important so we could make sure the technology we’d built worked properly and members could easily follow the steps to self-certify and withdraw their loan.

For roll-out after beta-testing, we reviewed various options and concluded that the fair thing to do is to operate on a first-come first-served basis: we’re assessing registrants according to when you registered on the waiting list.

Read more: Why aren’t you prioritising people for a Bounce Back Loan based on how urgently they need the loan? 

This would have been ideal. Unfortunately there are so many businesses in difficulty and we don’t want to delay lending by building a method to assess who is more in need.

We know how important these loans are for all businesses who’ve registered interest and we believe that the fairest and fastest process is to work through the waiting list.

The Bounce Back Loan Scheme is a Government initiative open to all eligible small businesses. We believe it isn’t fair to discriminate against new customers so that’s why any small business owner can still apply for an account with us, and if they wish, register their interest in getting a Tide Bounce Back Loan.

Almost 90% of the businesses on our waiting list are existing rather than new members.

No, we’re not giving priority for Bounce Back Loans to members on any of our different membership plans.

The Bounce Back Loan Scheme is a Government initiative open to all eligible small businesses. We decided the most fair thing to do was to offer Bounce Back Loans to as many businesses as we can. That’s why we’re not prioritising people for loans based on what Tide membership they have.

The monthly charge for Plus and Premium membership is for an enhanced service to support your growing business and for extra perks you don’t get with our free basic membership.

Read more: Q. Why aren’t you prioritising people for a Bounce Back Loan based on how urgently they need the loan? 

The beta-test members who first received Tide Bounce Back Loans were limited companies. When we announced this, we’re sorry if this was confusing and it seemed like we’d offered loans to all limited companies who’d registered.  Our small beta-test batch were owners of limited companies who had been Tide members for a while.

Since then, the Government has made changes to the law about Bounce Back Loans so that all accredited lenders can lend to sole traders as well as limited companies. We’re delighted about this update to the rules because we know it’ll help so many of you who’ve told us you’ve ‘fallen down the cracks’ of the support from the Government. We’re now working on making the loans available to our sole trader members as soon as possible.

Your first repayment will be due in the thirteenth month after you receive the money. You’ll be able to see this in your Tide app.

You can choose to repay earlier if you wish – there’s no early repayment fee.

We’ll take the repayments automatically from the Tide account into which you received the loan money.

It doesn’t matter if you use another business account for your banking but you must make sure there’s enough money in your Tide account when your repayments are due.<

You can choose to repay earlier if you wish – there’s no early repayment fee.<

Yes, you can choose to repay all or part of the loan earlier if you wish.

There’s no early repayment fee.

If you’re concerned you won’t be able to make a repayment on your Bounce Back Loan, let us know as soon as possible by emailing: collections@tide.co We’ll talk over the options and work out a repayment plan.

Yes, we’ve offered Bounce Back Loans to a large number of members and the majority of them have already withdrawn from their loan offer.

We want to be open and clear about what’s happening so later this week (first week of June), Oliver, our CEO, will write to everyone again with an update on our lending with as much information as possible.

We aim to offer a Bounce Back Loan to everyone who registered with us who is eligible. We’re currently scaling up to deliver hundreds of millions of pounds in loans.

This week – the first week of June, three weeks since our accreditation to deliver Bounce Back Loans – Oliver, our CEO, will write to all members again with an update on our lending. We’ll continue to write these updates regularly.

Remember, we’re aiming to offer loans to as many of you as possible – but we can’t promise that we’ll be able to do this. To find out more about the various factors that affect our lending, read the FAQ: When will I get a loan from Tide? I need a loan right now. 

Read more: Q. How is Tide funding these Bounce Back loans? Isn’t the Government funding the loans?

Make sure you’re using the most up-to-date version of the Tide app.

To do this, go to your app store and search for ‘Tide’. In the app page, if it says ‘Update’, please select this. When the update is complete, open your Tide app and go to More > Credit > Bounce Back Loan

Still can’t see Bounce Back Loan in your app? Please send us a message in the app and we’ll investigate.

There is no ‘cooling-off period’ needed. When approved, you have six months to decide whether you wish to draw down on the loan. After you’ve drawn down, if you decide you no longer need the Bounce Back Loan, you can repay it at any stage. There’s no early repayment fee and if paid within 12 months, you won’t pay any interest.

If you’ve applied for a Bounce Back Loan elsewhere, or you no longer want a Bounce Back Loan from Tide, it’d be helpful if you could let us know. Message us by email (hello@tide.co) or in the app and we’ll remove you from the list.

Not yet but we’re working on it.

If you’re interested in switching the amount you owe as part of your Credit Line to a Bounce Back Loan, let us know by email: hello@tide.co

Great question! The Bounce Back Loan Scheme is 100% guaranteed by the Government. ‘Guaranteed’ means that if the lender doesn’t collect the loan, then the Government has to reimburse the lender. It doesn’t mean the money is given to lenders by the Government.

All loans that we provide through the Bounce Back Loan Scheme are funded by Tide and not the Government. This means we have to raise the money we lend through the Bounce Back Loan Scheme. Then we lend it to members, up to a limit set by the British Business Bank.

Because the Government guarantees the loans, they need to have control over how much all accredited lenders are lending. When we reach our lending limit, we re-apply to the British Business Bank for an increase so we can continue lending.

We’ve increased our Member Support team to make sure we can respond to all members who need our help, whether you’re asking about the loans or anything else about using Tide.

As well as hiring more staff and training them quickly, we reorganised our priorities so that Tideans (our word for Tide staff) from across the company were able to jump in to help our Member Support team.

We’re working 24/7. Because we’re working remotely to comply with coronavirus guidelines, there are more of us able to help and for more hours. It’s not just Member Support who are working 24/7, our Credit team is working weekends, bank holidays and evenings to get loan offers out to you.

We know this is a stressful time and many people are within days or weeks of losing their businesses. The majority of the 40,000+ people on our Bounce Back Loans waiting list have been very patient. We appreciate this and we’re working as fast as we can.

We support free speech but if anyone posts messages that are abusive, wrong or threatening, we’ll take steps to address this and protect our staff.

Some of you have told us that some lenders appear to be prioritising customers who are vocal on social media. We believe the fairest way to work is in order through our waiting list – voicing impatience or frustration on social media doesn’t make someone a higher priority for a loan than everyone else.

We’re sorry you’re not happy – did you give us a chance to sort it out? Please message us in the app or by email hello@tide.co

We set out our complaints handling procedures and the rights you have to complain to the Financial Ombudsman Service in our Tide Terms.

Read more: FAQ: How do I make a complaint?