Hi - thought I’d chime in here as these are points which resonate a lot with me (I’m Tide’s founder).
In short: you make good points, of course. In particular, international payments are our top feature priority and I regret that we haven’t got them out of the door already. I’m happy to disclose why we haven’t. Essentially, it would have been easy for us to deliver outbound international payments (there are lots of partners with whom we could do that). However, inbound international payments require IBANS and that is far more complex to deliver (there definitely aren’t lots of partners with whom we could work, and we’ve had to build a lot of the core functionality from scratch). We could have launched an uninspiring version of the feature which converted all payments into GBP automatically (perhaps at an expensive rate changed by a broker), but that wouldn’t be useful for companies who maintain balances in different currencies.
Hence, instead, we’ve taken on the much bigger task of building a proprietary forex capability which will give you a unique IBAN and the ability to hold pots of money in lots of different currencies. We believe this will be the most sophisticated international payments capability for SMEs in the World.
This wasn’t the plan when we initially launched Tide: it’s an improvement on the original plan and does mean that the date of IBAN launch has been pushed out a bit. This is why we don’t publish a timetable: we know that our members are businesses who need certainty and we don’t want to commit to dates on which we might later backtrack. However: this feature will be worth the wait. Most of it is already built, but it is still a handful of months away I’m afraid.
Standing orders are a much more straightforward feature. They’re on the roadmap, but actually you’d be surprised by how few members have requested them. I’m sorry we don’t have them yet but it won’t be long.
In our first few months after launch we had to focus on a lot of “background” functionality which was invisible to our members but essential to ensure a high quality of service at scale. Now, more of the visible features are beginning to trickle through (e.g. the recent launch of TouchID on iOS, with Android just around the corner). You’ll see more and more of this in the next few weeks and months: our pace of feature releases is increasing as we beef up our development team substantially.
So, thank you for taking the time to discuss this with us on here. I’m extremely appreciative. Thank you also for your patience. We’re nearly there!