UK’s small biz fintech Tide enters India

Mumbai: Tide, UK’s SME-focused business financial platform, has launched operations in India by introducing a business banking account and its RuPay-powered Tide Expense Card. The company plans to onboard five lakh SMEs in India over 24 months.

While Tide is not a bank, it offers banking services in partnership with banks. The Tide Business Account and Tide Expense Card, in partnership with Transcorp, enables small business owners to track spending and business expenses and facilitate transactions at all merchants that accept RuPay payments. In future, the company will facilitate lending on its platform.

Speaking to TOI, Tide CEO Oliver Prill said that the company’s focus was in the micro segment of the MSME business. “The only way you can serve the smaller end of the market is by doing a lot of volumes and offering a broad range of services where you have a little bit of revenue from each service. We have never seen a business model that can work on a single product.”

Tide is differentiating itself from other fintechs by onboarding small businesses only based on a full know-your-customer (KYC) process, on par with a banking process. This enables businesses to get the benefits of a business account upon onboarding. It is more like an Indian company as its product engineering centre is in Hyderabad, where over half of its employees are based.

Prill said that internationally there was a fintech winter that will impact India. “We think, in part, this is a really good correction. What happens with inflated valuations is a lot of money pushing into questionable business models. We are entering India with a real business model, and we had a series-C funding, so we do not need to raise anytime soon,” said Prill.

Tide (India) CEO Gurjodhpal Singh said, “As Tide scales in India, we will expand our product offering for entrepreneurs to both manage their finances seamlessly and to take the big step of starting out — whether it’s as a freelancer, sole trader, contractor or small business owner.”


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