Tide is the conspicuous absence next to Qonto and Countingup in your database, and the reason is worth stating: it is now the largest of the three by members and one of the few European fintechs whose biggest market is India. Founded in London in 2015, it is a business management platform rather than a bank — an e-money institution offering business current accounts alongside invoicing, accounting with VAT returns and Self Assessment, expense management, payroll, card readers, company registration and credit.
The scale is substantial. Tide passed two million members globally in 2026, with roughly 750,000 in the UK — around 13–14% of the UK small business market — and over 750,000 in India, which overtook the UK as its largest market by member count. It has lent more than £1 billion to UK SMEs, employs over 2,800 people across the UK, India, Germany, France, Bulgaria, Luxembourg, Lithuania and Serbia, and describes its UK business as profitable. In September 2025 a $120 million primary and secondary investment led by TPG's Rise Funds, with existing backer Apax Digital participating, valued the company at $1.5 billion — up from $650 million in 2021 — taking total funding to roughly $181 million.
The India strategy is the genuinely distinctive part and deserves more attention than it gets. Most European fintechs expand into adjacent European markets or attempt the US; Tide went to a market with tens of millions of underbanked small businesses and built a base there larger than its home market, including a stated target of 500,000 women-led businesses in India by 2027. Germany and France followed, France starting with credit products. Oliver Prill, CEO since 2018, has been explicit that an exit will come eventually but that the 2025 round was about momentum and liquidity rather than pre-IPO positioning. The open question is the one facing every SME platform: whether the bundled software — accounting, payroll, invoicing — creates enough lock-in to defend against banks that decide to compete properly on the account itself.