100% Secure!

I signed up with a new bank recently called Tide, its one of the new challenger banks but unlike the Monzo its focused at small businesses and offers business current accounts.

The app and onboarding experience is slick and efficient, in fact I signed up and supplied an ID document on the walk home from the station. As with the other new banks Tide gives the impression that its been built by a modern company that knows what they are doing and knows how to build a service that is both secure and what the consumers actually want. That is until they say something silly like 100% secure.

When you start working with computers and the web and look at the regular data breaches and different ways these occur you quickly realise that the only thing you can be 100% sure about is that you will suffer some kind of hack or data breach/loss.

Most companies realise this and avoid making this type of claim so its the ones that do you need to be worried about. In a lot of cases i'd expect its someone who isn't technically savvy coming up with text that sounds reassuring but when you're talking about a regulated industry like banking every element of the user interface should have been check for various compliance reasons.
In the picture they also say they are FCA regulated, the way this is worded suggests they are using it as an endorsement which is skirting the rules if not a violation of them.

I ended up contacting Tide to find out what the situation was and in this instance the message specifically related to money rather than your data. Because of the way they hold users money it cannot get lost and is "100% secure". It would have been nice if the statement was a little clearer but it's reassuring they don't try and claim the offering in general is 100% secure!

Tide itself seems like an interesting offering and one that I am still going to experiment with, the 500 error I recently received when trying to login wasn't great but the ease and simplicity of the rest of the system certainly gives them some wiggle room when other issues do crop up.