UK neobank Tide has launched a new receipt importing tool

via Business Insider

Tide, a UK-based neobank that services small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), has debuted a new expense management tool that enables users to upload an image of a receipt and automatically have the expense matched to a transaction made through their Tide account in real time, according to a press release sent to Business Insider Intelligence. A machine learning (ML) model matches the receipts to the transactions and gets more accurate each time the client uses it. The feature is being rolled out free of charge to all of Tide’s 140,000 clients.

The receipt importer will be beneficial to all of Tide’s clients, but will likely prove especially useful for very small business customers. SMBs spend nearly one-third (30%) of their time on administrative tasks that don’t actually contribute to their bottom lines, per data from Atomik Research cited by Tide, and more than half (54%) of Tide users surveyed by the neobank said that they store and manage physical receipts to hand over to accountants.

All of these businesses will benefit from a more intuitive way to handle their bookkeeping, though the smallest among them will benefit the most: These companies are the least likely to have staff on hand who can be dedicated to administrative or accounting tasks.

The new tool can help Tide enhance its value proposition as it grapples with fellow UK challengers for SMB customers:

• Starling Bank has been going all out to enhance the business marketplace it offers — which functions more or less like an app store for business-oriented financial products — by expanding the tools available several times in the past few months alone. Starling also added more flexibility to its own banking offerings for businesses last year, introducing a new dual-currency debit card and business euro account as well as a web portal to give businesses another way to manage their accounts beyond its mobile app.
• OakNorth has enjoyed impressive success so far as well. The challenger offers large loans — up to $80 million — to businesses at very competitive rates. As of its 2018 annual results filing (its most recent), it had lent $4 billion to UK businesses without any defaults and, even more impressively, revealed a 220% increase in pre-tax profits to $46 million, per Forbes. This is no small feat, given that profitability is a problem that continues to vex the vast majority of neobanks.