From 30 People to 1.5 Million Members: Tide’s Playbook for Scaling Fast

When Oliver Prill became CEO at London-based SME challenger bank Tide in 2018, the company had only just begun its journey toward becoming a leading player in European fintech.

Back then, Tide had just 30 employees and served around 18,000 small businesses in the UK. Fast forward to today, and the company now supports more than 1.5 million members across multiple countries. The difference between the early days and today, in Prill’s words, comes down to a single word: scale.

Tide’s mission has remained consistent: simplify the daily running of small businesses. Through its platform, members can open bank accounts, access credit, and manage a range of essential tasks such as payments, invoicing, and bookkeeping. Founded in 2015, launched in 2017, and backed by Speedinvest in 2018, Tide has raised more than $200 million to date.

“What really attracted me was that Tide was solving a real societal problem in the sense that small businesses, with no finance function, want to get on with running their business but are burdened by all this finance and admin, wasting loads of time, and Tide was out there to solve it,” Oliver told Speedinvest.

Navigating Early Skepticism

Despite the clarity of the mission, the early days of Tide were defined by uncertainty, not just internally, but across the entire fintech ecosystem.

“This was still the time, not that long ago, when people said: really, will players like Tide succeed? Will places like Revolut, Starling, Monzo, and so on succeed? Or are they just a phase, and the big banks would take over?” Oliver recalled.

ced that new digital-first challengers would survive against incumbents with centuries of experience. For Tide, securing capital meant demonstrating not only product-market fit, but also the conviction that small businesses were underserved by the traditional banking sector.

It was a dynamic environment, but one that created opportunities for those willing to take bold bets. Oliver’s task was clear: professionalize the company’s foundations while building a team and culture that could sustain long-term growth.

“The big challenge back then was convincing investors that challengers were not just a flash in the pan,” Oliver said. “You had to prove there was a structural need, especially for SMEs, otherwise people just assumed the incumbents would crush you.”

The best way to work beyond that early skepticism was to “show traction, show that the model worked, and show that small businesses really were underserved. If you didn’t, people thought you would be dead in a year,” Oliver added.

Building the Right Team for the Long Haul

Scaling a lasting business requires the right people, at the right time, and for Tide, early decisions around hiring proved crucial.

“There is a real temptation, especially when you start, for talent to structure around individuals,” Oliver explained. “And to celebrate the warm body that’s around.”

In other words, it was easy to hire reactively, filling immediate gaps rather than planning ahead. But Oliver quickly realized that this approach wouldn’t support Tide’s ambitions.

“We realised very quickly, right, you would go in and you say, Oh, well, I need, you know, a head of this, or, you know, a director of that or a VP of this… and you say, No, no, no, we need someone that actually can be with us for the next couple of years,” he said. 

“And so we… size that role not how big it is today, but what it would be in two to three years, and then let’s hire someone and pay that person the package that we would only be able to pay them at that time.”

By thinking two or three steps ahead, Tide avoided the costly cycle of constant rehiring and restructuring. That forward-looking approach to talent helped the company scale rapidly without losing focus on execution.

Hiring for the future and the now simultaneously comes with another risk: losing the essence of company culture. For Tide, this became an important inflection point once the team grew beyond the 30–50 person mark.

“When you sort of pass the 30–50 benchmark of employees… you stop touching everyone in the business,” Oliver said. “And so it is important that things are codified, you know, in your values, your assessments. People realise that living the values is very clear… otherwise your company culture can go quite a bit adrift.”

For Tide, this meant codifying culture across the company, something that became even more crucial as the business grew internationally. Codification was more than words on a wall, according to Oliver. 

It required embedding them into hiring, performance reviews, and day-to-day operations. For a company moving as quickly as Tide, that clarity helped prevent drift as new offices, products, and teams were added.

Scaling Through Product, Not Just Acquisition

Tide’s growth story also includes a number of acquisitions, but the company has been deliberate in how it approaches them. Not all M&A strategies are created equal.

For many businesses, the idea of acquiring customers through M&A can be attractive. But Tide took a different approach. “

You essentially need to migrate all these customers from one platform to the other, or even worse, you know, try to bang two platforms together,” Oliver added. “So that’s why I think we’ve seen very little… frankly, just give the marketing team the marketing budget and they can acquire them.”

Instead, Tide has focused on product-led acquisitions, buying companies for their technology and then integrating that functionality into Tide’s own platform. Tide acquired London-based platform Onfolk last year, adding to a previous deal for Funding Options in 2023.

“The playbook for both Funding Options on credit intermediation and with Onfolk for payroll… was very simple,” Oliver said. “We shut off everything that we have that sort of does this. We integrate their functionality, their product into the Tide platform, then we scale it like crazy.”

That clarity has allowed Tide to expand its offering while maintaining a cohesive platform experience for members. The company’s growing suite of products now also includes Tide Rewards, a cashback scheme designed to help small businesses save money when they spend at more than 100 leading retailers in the UK. 

International Expansion

From its roots in London, Tide has seen many other fintech businesses look to rapidly grow into new markets, a trend that was amplified during the growth-at-all-costs era exemplified by Covid-19’s massive funding rounds. 

The days of flags on the map are over, though, Oliver says. 

Tide was intentionally deliberate with its expansion plans. 

Expanding beyond the UK meant rethinking how Tide structured itself operationally. As Prill pointed out, “one global platform makes it difficult to have local product managers. But if they don’t have any local insight, how do you ensure they’re getting real market feedback?” That tension guided Tide’s approach to its first international launch. “We treated India as our first international market, so it was imperative that we refine our operating model there before going into any others.”

“When we looked around internationally, we needed markets with lots of SMEs, and India stands out by a million miles and is in a league of its own.

After Brexit, we had to set up product engineering facilities in India, which led to us understanding the market inside out,” Oliver added. 

Those early efforts paid off. A recent data point shows India has now overtaken the UK as Tide’s largest customer base, hitting 800,000 members, and that was achieved in less than three years since entering the market. 

Being operationally solid was crucial to ensuring that Tide’s platform worked across its product offerings and that the UK market was cash flow positive, before any overseas attempts. 

Following the continued success and growth of the Indian market, Tide made Germany its second market in 2024. 

“Germany was the next obvious market after India. It’s Europe’s largest economy and, being part of the single market, has a regulatory environment we already understand very well,” Oliver added. “In Germany, it wasn’t about proving the operating model in the same way as in India. It was more about adapting the proposition to a very competitive market and making sure we stood out.”

As a lesson in scaling, India “was really about building the muscle of an international operating model,” Oliver said. “Germany is about refining how we adapt our proposition for local needs within a European context.”

With capital more constrained for many companies, the idea of spray-and-pray approaches to international expansion no longer pays dividends. But, carefully thought-out approaches, international expertise meeting local needs highlight the best model for success.

Planning Across Horizons

For a fintech scaling at speed, balancing short-term agility with long-term planning is always a challenge.

“Often, let’s say less experienced individuals, always well-intended, confuse agile with having no plan of where to go,” Oliver noted.

At Tide, the discipline has been to plan across multiple horizons: addressing immediate needs, anticipating the requirements of the next 12–24 months, and keeping a longer-term strategic direction in mind. That balance, between agility and foresight, has been central to Tide’s ability to grow quickly without losing direction.

“What you really need is to plan across horizons. You need a one-year plan, a two-to-three-year plan, and then also a longer-term view. Each one informs the other.”

This focus on long-term planning has made it possible for Tide to stay on top of multiple markets and product priorities. 

Looking back, Prill sees Tide’s journey as a case study in the realities of scaling a fintech beyond its home market. From early skepticism and fundraising pressures to building a durable culture and disciplined acquisition strategy, the path has been far from straightforward.

Yet the company’s growth, from 30 people when Oliver joined to more than 2,500 employees and 1.5 million members globally, demonstrates the power of clarity in mission and discipline in execution. As Tide continues to expand internationally, the lessons learned in India and Germany will serve as a blueprint for scaling responsibly in new markets.

For Prill, it all comes back to scale. “So to sum it up in a single word, it was scaling that was the challenge.”