A timetable, even if approximate, for new features would be good - reassure us that they’re coming.

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!

Technology is a moving target and software is never complete. When Tide started, it was one of the first neo/challenger banks to target only the SMEs - a market sector that was totally being ignored by the so-called Big Fours. And Tide did capture some part of the market.

Tide started out as a basic app with a minimalistic set of features mainly because their idea was quite simple. Most things in life start small and basic but that doesn’t mean, they cannot grow. Some people don’t realize but Tide has continued to improve over the months (e.g. in account recovery, account limits reporting, web UI enhancements, etc).

With that being said, considering Tide’s price-point and targetted audience, there’s hardly any other competitor that does it better.

Obviously, products are never perfect or complete; as there would always be something missing or some feature lacking that someone really wants. But given the track record, I have total confidence that Tide will continue to evolve. So I concur with @george.bevis’s view on this!

Thank you, George, for the update. I also think standing orders are a basic feature and will appreciate when it’s done. I look forward to using it as it will save a lot of time.
And I love the personal touch and the responsiveness. The way to go.
Thanks again!

Hello,

I’ve found this discussion useful as I’m still looking into setting up an account. Specifically just now I was looking to find how you set up two account holders (me and my business partner) - sounds like that is not possible yet?

Emma

Thank you. Really helpful.

As others have said even a rough timescale would be helpful for decision making - 2-3 months? 6 months?

From my perspective, I would prefer you to incrementally improve the offerings, not try to boil the ocean - it would have been far more useful and expedient to most of us to offer CHAPS/IBAN capability, even restricted, as that has been requested frequently for many months. You could then extend the features to include multi-currency pots, which would only make it better. Right now, I can’t use Tide because it doesn’t accept incoming IBAN payments. That’s daft. And telling me it will be “months” tells me to use another service.

I also agree that Standing Orders, and a roadmap are verging on essential features. I am fully aware that Tide is effectively a software product, and will never be ‘complete’, but it would be great to see what features are actually being considered, or worked on.

As for Standing Orders, that’s a must. So much so that to be honest I didn’t check when I signed up. Am currently having to retain my old account until this is sorted.

But great to see the founder of a disruptive product getting stuck in on the community forums.

Rich

I have also learned today that Tide does not accept paper Direct Debit mandates, despite providing an address for this purpose. It took about a month for this to actually be mentioned to us after we originally contacted support about a £10k payment bouncing.

We don’t have a single supplier who is able to process digital DD mandates at present.

In its current state, no serious company should consider using Tide under any circumstance. It is not fit for purpose.

I’m a one person Limited Liability Company and the current feature set ticks all the boxes. Instant account setup and approval is awesome (it took me four weeks with Metrobank). I created two additional accounts instantly from the app, one for VAT, one for Corporation Tax, thats amazing. I only do a few transfers in, a few expenses and a few payments out each month. It might be light on big bank features but it ticks all my boxes.

Except for the always “coming soon” Xero feature that is, but theres always got to be one thing.

Good to know that Tide is working well for you! I’m personally looking forward to IBAN support.

It’s interesting that you’ve opted to create additional separate accounts for VAT and Corporation Tax.

1. At first glance, it seems like this would cause additional unnecessary accounting paperwork due to having to move funds amongst the various accounts, but I might be mistaken. Am I?

2. Also, I’m assuming that such a multi-account setup offers at least some specific benefits. Any insight as to what those would be? I might consider the same setup if the benefits outweigh the disadvantages (if any).

I have an accountant and use Xero which deals with any of the transfer transactions. They are just transfer transactions after all and in the accounts they are ignored. The difference is only virtual anyhow.

The benefit for me is that I take a tiny salary and then lots of dividends throughout the year. I make sure I always transfer 20% of any dividend to my corporate tax account (tax on profits) and as each invoice comes in I transfer the VAT component to the VAT account.

It’s rudimentary, but it ensures I stay on top of cash flow and always know how much money I have as Her Royal Majesty’s money sits in separate accounts.

Anyone with more accounting knowledge should feel free to butt in here and point out any shortcomings with my approach.

International payments aren’t a big part of my incoming transactions but when required I ask my client to send me their payment via Transferwise. It was easy to link my Tide account to Transferwise, a little bit like linking it to Paypal. My clients have never had a problem sending their funds to me that way, many of them actually said they liked having the option of paying in their own currency and I have found that to be a really effective way around the nonexistent IBAN problem. Saying that it would be nice in future if we could accept and send international payments directly from our Tide account.

Agreed it’s great to see such transparency on feature delivery. I also was surprised to find no standing order support. I’m happy to do a few months of manual payments but will be relieved when SO is available!