The Tide is changing for small business banking. Meet Max Bernier of Tide.co and ... Speed Man.

Litte sunset sesh on the West Coast. Pic by Speed Man aka Robert Douglas http://www.rdphotography.co/

Max stayed with us at our Sagres coworking and coliving villa during the summer of 2017 and we decided to quiz him a little bit on his new role and business banking start up for SME's Tide.co 

The Canadian shares his thoughts on Sagres, Surfing, Speed Man (aka Jamb0), the local beer and dishes out some career advice as well as letting us know why we should try Tide.

"Sagres is sick, really good waves, really good vibes and the beer is very good. It seems to be disappearing quicker than I anticipated."

Transcript:

So my name is Max Bernier

Can you tell us a little bit about your career to date so far?

Yeah so I spent most of my career in management consulting focusing mainly on financial institutions so this has been in pension funds and more recently it's been a big focus on fintechs so... financial technology firms

How did you get into that in the first place?

I got into that because I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do with my life as I think a lot of people find themselves at one point or another and I met I met a few people that were doing that work and they just highly recommended it. It was a challenging environment it's an environment where you can learn a lot so that's kind of how I got into it.

Can you tell us a little bit about what your new role is?

Yeah so I'm working for Tide now. What Tide is, is fundamentally a bank that's out there to help SMEs. It really came about as everyone at Tide has either been on the consumer side of business banking or on the service side of business banking and what we realized is that it's an awful product all in all.

We wanted to develop a bank and a platform that would really help business owners focus on their dream I think like you guys here at Coworksurf you have a mission that you want to do. You have an idea in mind and you want to get there, you know taking care of admin and taking care of banking is not on your top priority but there's still things that you need to do, so the idea was really to create a platform that would allow business owners to save time to scale their business as quickly as possible and also for as cheaply as possible.

One of the parts of your role as I understand is to grow Tide as a product. How are you planning on doing that? 

Yeah exactly so we're trying to partner with a lot of different people some of them are accountancy companies
others are people like yourself to really get the word out for Tide you know to say that we're a free product we're an
easy product. Completely digital and really just try to grow our network it's a sales position to some extent but it's a salesperson sales job for a product that's free so shouldn't be too too hard then.

Tell us what you think about Sagres

Sagres is sick, really good waves, really good vibes and the beer is very good. it seems to be disappearing quicker than I anticipated. No Sagres is sick the co-working spot here is sick. Really good people and I definitely plan on coming back whenever I have some free time

Have you met Speed Man?

I have met Speed Man the elusive Speed Man He's quite quick. 

Did someone say speed man. Hey man Speed Man is out surfboarding.

Try Tide.co today and get 50 free transfers with the code COWORKSURF