Tide targets 16 per cent market share if it scoops RBS bailout cash

The digital bank said it added 5,000 business banking customers in January.

Digital business bank Tide added 5,000 customers in January and claims it is “growing faster than any other business banking player”.

However, the start up added that if its £120m bid for the Royal Bank of Scotland's (RBS) fund aimed at increasing banking competition is successful its share of the business banking market could jump to between 10 per cent to 16 per cent.

Tide, founded in 2015, currently has 60,000 customers, or 1.1 per cent of the small business banking market.

Earlier this month Tide said it has partnered with challenger bank ClearBank to compete for a slice of the RBS fund, which totals £775m. The RBS fund is part of European Union conditions attached to its £45bn Government bailout a decade ago at the height of the financial crisis.

If their bid is successful the companies said their partnership will blend ClearBank’s payments infrastructure and Tide’s digital banking platform.

Tide chief executive Oliver Prill said: “Additional funding would mean we can transform the market even more quickly and create a genuine scale alternative to the traditional banks.

“With the infrastructure and customer proposition in place, we can focus the funding on driving awareness of the Tide brand, overcoming switching friction, and creating extremely powerful reasons for customers not to default to the Big Four oligopoly that has served them so poorly.”

Small businesses use Tide’s app to access balances and payments as well as for managing invoices which can be integrated into accounting systems. Customer’s don’t incur any annual or card usage fees but will get charged for cash withdrawals, transfers with non-Tide accounts and cash deposits at post offices.

Tide has raised $26m since it was launched four years ago from such notable backers as Augmentum, Passion Capital and SpeedInvest.