It enables businesses to set up a current account and get instant access to various financial services (including automated bookkeeping and integrated invoicing).

[9] He was joined by the UK Government advisor, venture capitalist and founder of Passion Capital, Eileen Burbidge, who became the Chairman of Tide.

[3] In August 2018, Oliver Prill, former chief operating officer at German online lender Kreditech, joined Tide as CEO.

[29][30] In January 2019, ClearBank announced a partnership with Tide to bid for a grant from Pool A of the Capability and Innovation Fund that formed part of RBS’s alternative remedies package.

[33] In February 2019, Tide backed calls for a financial services tribunal for small businesses to settle disputes with their lenders.

[35] In October of the same year, the company raised £44.1m in Series B fundraising, with the SBI Group and Augmentum Fintech leading the funding round.

Tide lent over £50m to just under 2,000 small businesses under the BBL scheme but was forced to close applications in July after running out of funds.

The lack of available finance affected the 250,000 small and medium-sized businesses which were unable to use the BBL scheme earlier as they did not bank with any of the 28 accredited lenders.

[16][6] Tide developed an API that allows integrations with the loan provider iwoca, and with accounting software such as Xero, FreeAgent, ReckonOne and Sage.