Tide Revamps SMB Overdraft, Card Offerings With Mambu

Cloud banking platform Mambu will help business banking platform Tide expand its services, including innovations in releasing larger overdrafts, credit cards and invoice financing, according to a press release from Mambu.

According to the release, Tide also wants to allow members to lend to other members using some new integrated technologies.

Tide especially wants to use the partnership to focus on bolstering small and medium-sided businesses (SMBs) in the U.K. The U.K. has seen an increase in challenger banks focusing on small businesses as of late.

In the U.K., Tide represents around 1 in 40 SMBs in the country. Tide has around 150,000 members overall, and helps with a range of things such as invoicing, expense management and accounting.

Eelco-Jan Boonstra, managing director of Mambu EMEA, said the common problem the company sees with many SMBs is that they don’t know how to respond to the new tools of the day, which ends up leaving many in the dust. Boonstra said the goal of Mambu was to make financial products that are “flexible, agile and customer-centric.”

Boonstra said the difference today is that, when customers evaluate where to do their banking, they look more at experiences than at comparisons between different banks.

Amit Kahana, vice president of credit services for Tide, said the company has ambitions to roll out numerous lending products in “multiple geographies.” With Mambu’s help, Tide hopes to expand its horizons and reach more people, embracing “new technologies and frameworks” in the FinTech sphere.

Tide recently rolled out a new program with help from Hokodo, which aims to help businesses at risk of losing cash flow from unpaid or late invoices — a problem exacerbated by the coronavirus.

The company noted that late payments had totaled a loss of 50 billion pounds for U.K. SMBs in 2019, and businesses spent as much as an hour and a half per day trying to settle those payments.

The program with Hokodo would protect the lost value on invoices that went unpaid or were late.