Better Business Banking — Creandum Fund IV Invests in Tide
It’s 2017 and banking is still broken on so many levels. In my recent experience helping set up Creandum Advisor’s Berlin branch at one of Europe’s largest banks, it took multiple visits, countless signatures, visits to the notary, and even a powerpoint of the firm’s organisational structure just to open a bank account. And now I receive paper-based account statements every three days! We need a new relationship to banking.
With their $14m Series A, George and Laurence from Tide.co are on a mission to revolutionize the banking experience for the European SMEs. Creandum Fund is proud to co-lead this round with Anthemis, joining LocalGlobe and Passion Capital, as well as a whole bunch of experienced angel investors.
The status quo
Today SMEs and sole traders are vastly underserved by the high street banks. Most established players are notoriously slow, expensive (riddled with hidden fees) and lack essential value added services and tools — there are many unmet needs in this space.
On top of that, banks are still ignoring the possibilities generated through new technology. Processes are paper based, slow and not customer centric, and a lot of the communication is offline. Adoption new opportunities due to the slowly, yet steadily changing regulatory frameworks does not seem to happen.
We believe there is an opportunity to fundamentally change how business banking is done. And Tide is on a mission to make that happen.
SMEs, freelancers, and sole traders are changing faster than the banks. They need immediate communication. Individual employees need purchasing rights and tools. And SMEs are now more international and mobile than ever.
Tide is the best new bank we have seen
Tide provides a full fledged mobile first business account in 5 minutes — an unparalleled user experience even compared to many consumer facing neobanks.
Tide aims to support multi-currency accounts and eliminate admin work by adding an array of different tools — from automated accounting to invoice management (creating/tracking/chasing).
Tide’s product is the central hub between customers, employees and product partners. Tide wants to be the brain of your SME when it comes to anything money.
And ultimately, Tide is SME first. Functions, products, user experience, team integrations, are all catered towards the SME. And that is why the product feedback is fantastic.
Our Hypothesis
We believe that business banking is one of the spaces in FinTech that lack innovation so far. Tide is in the position to completely revolutionize the banking experience.
We believe that SMEs appreciate products catered towards them. The consumerization of the enterprise is visible in so many areas. Tide will hit this space as well.
We believe fair and transparent pricing is appreciated by SMEs. And less paper, too.
We believe that by integrating partners that have specialised within their area, one can generate a complete product experience with best of class feature sets. The partnership with Iwoca that Tide announced today is just one example.
We believe big companies can be built by focussing on the SME segment.
So it goes without saying, we’re proud to back George and Laurence on the mission to build a completely new banking experience.
If this is excites you as much as it excites us, Tide.co is hiring for various positions in London.
Read what Techcrunch and Business Insider have to say.
At Creandum, we believe any industry can be disrupted by the right entrepreneur. Check out our website or follow Creandum Family on Medium to learn more.
