ClearBank and Tide have formed a partnership to help UK SMEs recover from the coronavirus crisis.
As part of their mission, the banks have applied for two grants from the Capability Innovation Fund worth £25m and £35m.
This funding will be used to offer financial support and products which help SMEs facing uncertain times caused by Covid-19 and Brexit. Their partnership will also combine ClearBank’s payments infrastructure with Tide’s digital banking platform to offer an alternative to high street banks.
Tide CEO Oliver Prill said, “Competition and choice in the business banking space is more important than ever and needs to be addressed urgently. Switching accounts has been made unnecessarily sticky, with old barriers remaining and the Government’s response to the coronavirus crisis reinforcing them.
“For example, repayments under the critical Bounce Back Loan Scheme will link millions of SMEs to the big five for many years. ClearBank’s world-class payments infrastructure combined with Tide’s unrivalled business banking platform mean that we can develop innovative ways to get around this, particularly by using Open Banking in the way it was intended.”
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