The boss of Tide, a British fintech which offers banking services to SMEs, says he is not one for showing off.
“I am quite a humble person, maybe too humble to be in our industry,” says Oliver Prill, its CEO, speaking over video.
You are unlikely to get a “war story” about Tide’s latest funding round from Prill, who says that Tide’s recent elevation to unicorn status was an achievement he “personally didn’t need”.
This might make the 55-year-old UCL economics graduate sound dour, a party pooper even, but it’s more that he talks in facts, not hyperbole.
“I am a very straight talker. I am never impolite, but I am to the point; maybe it’s a bit my German heritage,” the Hamburg-born Prill says.
That said, Prill, as is de rigueur in 2026, is not immune to at least some social media strutting.
On his LinkedIn page, where he goes by the honorific doctor, courtesy of his Oxford University philosophy doctorate, Prill has posted images of himself in elevated circles.
In one post, he can be seen grinning outside Number 10 Downing Street while another post sees him dressed to the nines sporting a white dickie bow, pictured next to fintech leaders at a banquet for German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
Two million customers
One achievement Tide and Prill are talking about is Tide today crossing two million customers, or “members” as Tide calls them, less than 10 years after its 2017 launch.
“It’s an important metric,” says Prill, saying it shows Tide has product-market fit and the unit economics work.
The two million “milestone” is a far cry from 2018, when Prill joined a “very very tiny” startup with just 30 employees, which had “all the potential in the world”.
Prill, with a background in financial services and working with SMEs, was drafted in to “scale it”, anchored by a seed round investment from Eileen Burbidge’s Passion Capital.
He says: “It was quite exciting. A true early startup at this stage. The business was at a level where it had early proof points, but it needed someone to scale.”
What does Tide do?
Tide, like a raft of digital-only fintechs, is looking to shake up the sedate world of traditional finance.
It describes itself as a “business financial platform”, which is aimed at small businesses, freelancers and sole traders.
It is not technically a bank, but an e-money institution which provides business current accounts in partnership with ClearBank, which is a licensed bank.
It also offers loans and services like expense management, invoice and accounting and, most recently, insurance.
It makes its money through plans and business tool subscriptions, interest earned on deposits, interchange and transaction fees, as well as lending and insurance products.
International expansion
One of the most eye-catching things about Tide is its unusual geographical split, with a presence in the UK, Germany, France and India, something of an outlier amid a roll call of British fintechs selling their wares stateside.
The London-headquartered fintech’s core market is the UK, which makes up the “vast majority” of its revenues, and which is subsidising its international push.
Tide Holdings, the parent company, made revenues of £190m in 2024, on losses of £26m.
Prill says: “The UK is structurally profitable, so what we are doing is we’re taking the money we are making in the UK and investing it abroad.”
The UK market
Tide has 900,000 customers in the UK, which equates to around 15 per cent of the small business market in the UK, helping businesses access over £1.75bn in credit.
However, a handbrake on its growth has been new rules on so-called “Authorised Push Payment” (APP) fraud, which has meant payment services providers like Tide must reimburse customers who fall victim to it.
In a dig at the rules, Prill says: “The APP fraud regulation meant we had to direct a lot of investment into the technology that prevents APP fraud. Fraud has still increased net in the market, so not sure how successful that regulation was.”
Probably “the biggest headwind”, though, is the faltering UK economy, putting a lot of pressure on Tide’s core market of SMEs, he says.
India
Tide has boots on the ground in Germany and France, where Tide is “just beginning its journey”.
Like in the UK, SMEs are the spine of their economies, with the bounty being that the digitisation of financial services are five years behind the UK, says Prill.
Tide’s entry into the Indian market came via the circuitous route of it setting up an engineering hub in Hyderabad, as it scrambled for engineering talent post-Brexit, giving Tide a “strong conviction” about the market.
Tide’s India business now has 1.1m customers, its biggest in terms of customers, albeit this represents less than a paltry one per cent of the estimated 120m SMEs in India.
Prill says: “The Indian government has been very good at putting infrastructure in place, with UPI (United Payments Interface), the payment system for example.
“So a lot of things, in a bizarre sort of way, are digitally infrastructure-wise much more advanced than we have in Europe.”
The former McKinsey executive gets out to India at least twice a year, in a market where the “biggest competitor is cash”, trying to stay for a minimum of two weeks.
He says: “There is this thing about building social bonds, meeting government officials and so on.”
US investor-led funding round
Last year, Tide raised $120m at a valuation of $1.5bn, in a funding round led by US private equity firm TPG and including Tide’s existing investor Apax Digital Funds.
That Tide received funding from a US investor amid a UK government push to increase homegrown funding of British success stories, with endeavours like the Mansion House Accord agreement and Sovereign AI, is a reminder of where venture power rests.
Prill said the priority of the funding round was less about capital raising and more about giving exits to angel investors and early employees.
On the funding round, he says: “We have a lot of angels that have made a lot of money and where looking for the ability to do secondaries.
“What we wanted to do is have more late-stage investors. We bought Apax in at the beginning of it, and we wanted TPG as a second late-stage investor.”
On reaching unicorn status, he says: “I didn’t personally need the unicorn status. But it is very meaningful for a lot of people.”
2026 agenda and IPO prospects
On a possible Tide IPO, Prill says: “It’s not anywhere near-term. We are not on a path to an IPO anytime soon.”
Instead, the focus is on scaling the business in the UK and overseas, which he says will be aided by its use of AI advancements.
Currently, Tide is leveraging AI heavily internally for product engineering, with a consumer-facing AI product soon to launch.
“Often we are not as vocal as others” on AI, says Prill.
Still enjoying the job?
Prill, whose wife is German, whom he met at Oxford University and who splits him time between the UK and Germany, says his strengths are that he’s a “strategic” thinker.
He says: “I am a very structured, organised person. I can really mobilise people to get a job done.”
A weakness is his brusqueness and impatience, he admits.
Eight years at the helm of a fintech is a long tenure, but as Prill points out the role has not stuck in aspic.
He says his role has evolved from being hands-on to now dealing with big decisions, where there are “blockers”.
He adds: “Every year Tide is quite different. I like new challenges.”
