Tide Bank: Review

Tide is a mobile-first fintech neobank offering bank accounts for freelancers and SMEs registered in the UK. Since its launch in 2015, it has been making waves as an innovative alternative to high street bank by making money admin easier for small business owners. Tide was one of the first digital banks to focus on businesses only, offering a wide range of features such as accounting integrations, invoicing and much more.

In this review, our team of experts aims to deliver an unbiased in-depth assessment of Tide bank, listing various pros & cons the bank has, provide you with complete pricing information in our plan comparison table and suggest the best alternatives available. Interested? Read our Tide bank review below.

In numerous press releases, Tide founders mentioned that the most important feature of their bank accounts is providing companies that use it complete security that exceeds one offered by traditional "brick-and-mortar" banks. For example, by partnering with UK’s newest clearing bank ClearBank, Tide offers their customers true safety of a fully-licensed bank with deposits protected by FSCS for up to £85,000 per account.

What more is there to this challenger bank? Our Tide bank review attempts to cover it all. Our aim is to provide you with sufficient information for you to make an important decision yourself: does the offering of this London-based fintech suit your specific business banking needs?

If you're new to our website, we suggest you also check out our selection of French neobank experiencing hyper-growth we previously reviewedfeatured articles and informative content that will save you money and time, starting with our "Complete Guide to Banking in the UK".

From Free to Cashback, Tide offers a grand total of three different plans, catering to businesses of various sizes and types. These Tide subscriptions aim at different audiences, ranging from sole proprietorships and freelancers looking for a bank account, all the way to enterprises with thousands of employees. You'll find our Tide bank plan comparison table below, listing the differences between subscriptions and providing you with an overview of costs involved.

Worried about banking at an online-only mobile-first neobank? Read ourguide to a recently booming mobile-first banking industry and take a look at ourcurated list of the best business bank accounts available to companies in the UK and all over the EU.

The "Tide Free" plan is the entry-level account offered by the neobank. This subscription comes with a free bank card, account "read-only" access for team members, as well as other business features including accounting software integrations.

All the essential banking features for your company's day-to-day operations are available in this plan, meeting the needs of many freelancers or small businesses that are just starting out. The beauty of this option is that you can test the waters for free, then upgrade once your business scales up.

The "Plus" plan builds on the core set of Tide's business account benefits available at no monthly cost. In addition to everything included in the "Free" plan, "Plus" users get a free monthly quota on transfers, a free employee expense card, priority in-app support and much more. It must be mentioned that even Tide representatives previously claimed this is the plan that's the best option for the majority of businesses.

Our review team agrees on one thing: "Plus" lacks the limitations that understandably hamstring the fee-free account, and comes at a reasonable cost, while "Cashback" might just be an overkill for most enterprises. Consider this option the default - and it delivers a great cost-to-benefit ratio!

"Cashback" is the top-tier premium business banking product in Tide's portfolio. As the name implies, you can take advantage of getting a 0.5% cashback on all payments made using your Tide business card. In addition to this, you get unrestricted access to an account management team to assist you should the need arise.

This plans suits enterprise-scale businesses with high turnover and frequent card transactions. Beyond this, it also expands on a set of limits and thresholds of the lower-tier accounts.

Business banking products offered by Tide vary quite significantly both in the range of features available, business entity types they aim for, and, of course, in pricing. Let's dive deeper by taking a look at a side-by-side comparison of Tide bank accounts offered to businesses below.

Tide makes it very easy to integrate your bank account with a wide range of popular bookkeeping software. You can forget endless Excel sheets and clunky transaction history logs - all you need to do is to directly connect your Tide bank account to Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, KashFlow, FreeAgent and Reckon.

These are set up in a "plug-and-play" fashion and you'd be surprised by how easy it is. This is great - although maybe a bit less impressive than some dedicated tools for cash flow management and managerial reporting deliver.

With Tide, you can order up to 50 employee expense cards for your team members and stay in complete control of your company's cash flow and expenses. Combined with an ability to create dedicated sub-accounts for specific purposes, managing expenses becomes a breeze and you'll never miss irregularities or encounter unauthorized overspending again.

Tide allows customers to provide a unique "read-only" access for your team. This allows you to provide your accountant a complete overview of your financial activity without compromising your account's security.

Tide's customer support agents are available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Support representatives can always be reached via the in-app chat or email (the response time is surprisingly quick!) and there is a dedicated phone number you can call in case of an emergency: for example, losing your bank card or having it stolen.

Tide's credit builder offers anyone to build up their company's credit history in 12 months for under £50 in total. You can also check your credit rating at any time using your Tide mobile app. Tide Credit Builder is specifically tailored to assist SMEs in growing their score, allowing recently formed companies and internationals moving to the UK to quickly get up and running. It also can assist in expanding businesses' options for financing available. This outstanding feature is extremely popular among UK-based neobanks, with Monese bank offering the same functionality for individuals.

Does the set of features provided by Tide lack something you are explicitly looking for? Perhaps, you are in search for a company account in a different price range? Or do you want to find a more powerful solution for your unique needs? Below, we will provide you with three Tide alternatives our team of experts identified as the best possible Tide replacements.

Our final assessment is as follows: Tide is definitely a solid option if you run (or are about to start!) a business in the UK. You will no doubt enjoy tremendous gains in efficiency of day-to-day banking operations in case you’re still banking at a traditional "brick-and-mortar" bank. No longer will you be struggling due to an insane amount of time it usually takes to make a tiny update to your bank account.

However, if you’re looking for some more sophisticated financial products for your business, you might find that Tide is just not yet fully there. Business owners should consider the option of having your Tide account supplement your main bank account, especially with the free basic account. That way, you would be free to enjoy all the benefits available at this neobank, while still having access to all the banking products you need.

While the bank is still growing and the product is under active development, it already is an attractive enough product that is sure to satisfy your entrepreneurial business needs. This is even more true now that Tide offers FSCS protection on new accounts - having partnered with ClearBank, a fully licensed bank.

Besides, Tide is a 100% digital banking app, which means new customers can open an account in less than five minutes using their mobile phone from the comfort of their home. Do you think it sounds attractive enough to check it out? Follow the links below and get "hands-on" with the product today!