The Tide Story

SMEs represent over 99% of all businesses in the UK from trades to tech startups, they are a hot bed of innovation and talent fuelling the economy. And yet, despite their vital importance, SMEs have consistently faced challenges when it comes to accessing suitable funding options from big banks and lenders.

According to the British Chambers of Commerce around half of small business feel that getting funding is a challenge. Indeed, 70% have not accessed finance from an external provider in the past twelve months.

With SME finance crucial to economic growth, Tide has stepped in to fill the gap left by traditional banks. With Funding Options by Tide, it’s on a mission to connect SMEs with traditional and alternative finance solutions.

To do this Tide needs data.

Accurate decision making for superior customer experiences

With Tide, SMEs can instantly compare the finance solutions available to them and choose the option that best suits their needs. Tide’s challenge is balancing the customer experience with the need to gather and assess as much data and insight on SME customers as possible.  
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Tide’s unique selling point is that it saves SMEs time, with no lengthy application process and a decision in minutes. Thomas Boyd, Head of Partnerships at Tide explains: “We need to surface and analyse real-time customer data to make quick educated decisions on best fit products for individual SME needs.  We don’t expect our customers to fill in lengthy quote forms, but we also don’t want to rely on self-declaration to make decisions.  To access finance solutions tailored to their needs, Tide requires reliable, up-to-date, and accurate data. Without FullCircl, we would be limited in terms of the product and service matching we could deliver.”

By utilising the FullCircl API applications are typically populated in under two minutes. Tide can surface actionable insights from multiple data sources – credit scores, Delphi scores, payment data, CCJ history, shareholder data. Powered by such advanced data orchestration, Tide can easily qualify applications and assign the right products based on the specific needs of SME customers, whilst limiting lengthy applications processes and delivering a personalised experience.
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“The scale of applications we receive has climbed year-on-year since we launched - we now process thousands every month”, says Thomas. “This would be uncontrollable without FullCircl and the data it provides.” Since integrating FullCircl it has achieved a 72% increase in the number of applications processed per year, and 90% increase in revenue in just 24 months."
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Today Tide is one of the UK’s fastest growing fintechs. It has already captured nearly 12% share of the UK SME banking market, serving more than 650,000 SME members.

A streamlined and optimised approach

Until recently Tide had used FullCircl in partnership with two other credit data providers.  But based on the success of the partnership and quality and range of data provided, Tide has now streamlined its tech stack, expanding its relationship with FullCircl and selecting it as their lead data provider.
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“The FullCircl API is solid, stable and perfectly integrated to provide us with a future-proof solution”, says Thomas. “By employing a more streamlined data strategy we believe we’ve optimised our capabilities moving forward and can remain the largest credit marketplace in the UK.”

A partnership for the long term

“Relationships with vendors can often be underplayed as a metric of success, but for us it’s big”, says Thomas. Moving forward Tide has plans to extend its relationship with FullCircl even further. It’s exploring opportunities to harness a broader range of data to make suggestions to lenders as well as customers and bring FullCircl’s artificial intelligence-driven automation and optimisation into play.

“We want partners that are commercially minded and aligned with what we are trying to achieve”, he continues. “We’ve found this with FullCircl. There’s no bureaucracy, they are fast-moving, responsive to every request we make, and deliver creative solutions to the challenges we face. This is what made us choose FullCircl - and it’s why we will stay with them.”