Speaking at Apidays London, Guy Duncan states that this functionality will be available in the very near future, possibly by the end of the year or Q1 2021 at the latest.

The lack of this at present means that the account holder, presumably the owner or CEO of a business, must surrender his or her device to the accounts department during payment runs and so on.

Duncan also claims the bank’s customers will double in number every 12 to 18 months having seen considerable growth since March this year.

The mobile-first banking platform for SMEs’ number of customers (or ‘members’ as Tide refers to them) has gone from 130,000 a little over six months ago to 250,000 now.

"This number will now double ever 12 to 18 months,” Duncan claims.

The growth Tide has enjoyed since March is possibly buoyed by businesses seeking a more digitally native banking proposition after the Covid-19 pandemic set in.

Tide’s hope may be that the SME market will significantly grow in the years ahead as the economic downturn sees a surge in unemployment and more people turning to self-employment, setting up their own businesses or seeking an income as independent contractors.

Duncan adds that Tide does not see itself as a bank, but rather an open banking platform, focusing on connectivity orchestration by “really rocking APIs”, in his words.

Tide teamed up with API platform, Gravitee, in June to make its system more scalable, secure and highly automated.

APIs are, according to Duncan, “extremely complicated, very difficult to build well and very easy to build poorly.”

“We all aspire for the ‘Stripe level’ APIs where you can do powerful things with just two or three lines of code, but it takes years to build up to that,” he adds.