Tide turns to India with £100m investment

Business banking platform Tide plans to enter the Indian market, creating more than 1,000 jobs and investing £100 million over the next five years.

India will be UK-based Tide’s first international market when it fully launches in the country early next year.

It already has over 200 employees in India, with the majority of these based at its Hyderabad technology centre.

Tide said that it intends to create a variety of new roles in India, across product development, software development, marketing, risk and compliance, and member support.

Oliver Prill, CEO of Tide, said: “Tide recognises the ambitions of both the UK and Indian governments to build India-UK bilateral relationships with an enhanced economic partnership and sees SMEs as being crucial to economic growth in both nations.

“We at Tide are committed to serving India’s 64 million, and growing, SME sector, helping to unleash the true potential of Indian small businesses by helping them to save time (and money) on their financial admin.”

He added: “Through our investment in the market, Tide looks to contribute to both the countries’ vision of developing a roadmap to a free trade agreement with a target of £100 billion by 2030.”

Tide said that in addition to offering business accounts and banking services in India, it will provide administration solutions to not only SMEs, but also the unregistered and unorganised sector, “helping small businesses digitise and bring them into the mainstream”.

As part of this offering, earlier this year Tide announced India’s RBL Bank as its first banking partner, providing the bank account infrastructure for Tide’s India platform where members (SMEs) will have an option to open current and savings accounts.

UK Minister for Investment Gerry Grimstone said: “I am pleased that Tide’s innovative business financial platform, part of the UK’s world leading fintech ecosystem, is embracing the opportunities in India’s dynamic and growing SME market. The UK and India have ambitious plans to deepen our trade and investment partnership and bring benefits to both economies, and this is a great example of what we can do together.”