Editorial policy

What this policy is for

refer200 publishes about money. People use these pages to decide where their business income lands, what they will pay to move it and whether it is protected. That deserves a written standard rather than a claim of good intentions, so this page sets out the rules we hold ourselves to, in enough detail that you can check whether we followed them. Any page failing these rules should be reported to contact@refer200.co.uk — see the corrections section below.

1. Sourcing rules

Every figure relating to the REFER200 partner offer, Tide's fees or Tide's account features is checked directly against Tide's own published terms. We do not take figures from other affiliate sites, comparison aggregators, press releases or AI summaries, and we do not carry a number forward from an old version of our own page without rechecking it.

Our hierarchy of sources, strongest first:

1. The provider's binding terms, offer terms, tariff and fee documents.
2. The relevant regulator or statutory scheme — the FCA Register, FSCS guidance, Companies House.
3. The provider's help centre and support pages, where terms are silent on the detail.
4. Our own testing, clearly labelled as our experience rather than a published rule.

Where the provider's marketing copy and its terms disagree, the terms win and we say the copy is misleading. Where we cannot establish something from any of the above, we publish the gap instead of an estimate.

Primary sources we use

• Tide's terms and conditions and the REFER200 partner offer terms for offer mechanics, qualifying steps, timings and payment structure.
• Tide's pricing page and its published cost breakdown for plan fees, allowances and per-transaction charges.
• The FCA Financial Services Register for permissions and regulatory status — including the distinction between e-money permissions and a banking licence.
• The Financial Services Compensation Scheme for how deposits are protected, what safeguarding is instead, and how the limit aggregates across brands sharing a licence.
• Companies House for corporate details, including our own.

2. How we test accounts

Reviews are based on accounts we opened and used. Testing follows a fixed protocol so that two providers are judged on the same tasks in the same order: application timed end to end, identity checks completed with real documents, then a standard set of everyday jobs — an outbound transfer, a Direct Debit, a card payment, an invoice, a categorised expense, an accounting-software connection — followed by identical support questions through every available channel, with response times logged.

We also read the account documents rather than the landing page: who holds the money, which sort code it sits behind, and what the protection position actually is. Anything we could not test — a feature gated behind a plan we did not hold, or a limit we could not trigger — is described from documentation and labelled as untested. The full protocol is listed on our about page.

3. How scores are set

Scores are not a vibe. Each account is marked against fixed, weighted criteria, and the weights are the same for every provider we review:

• Pricing and fees — 25%. Plan cost against realistic monthly usage, plus the charges most likely to catch people out: transfers beyond allowance, cash deposits, ATM withdrawals and FX.
• Onboarding and eligibility — 15%. How long the application takes, how demanding the identity checks are, and how clearly the provider states who it will and will not accept.
• App and day-to-day use — 20%. Payments, Direct Debits, invoicing, expense categorisation, receipt capture and accounting-software connections, tested on the live account.
• Cash, cheques and payments in — 10%. Whether cash and cheque handling exists at all, what it costs and how far you have to travel to use it.
• Support — 15%. Channels available, measured response times to identical questions, and whether the answer resolved the issue.
• Money protection and transparency — 15%. Regulatory permissions, who holds the funds, safeguarding versus FSCS eligibility, and how plainly the provider explains it.

A score is a summary of those marks, not a negotiating position. Commercial relationships have no weighting, and no provider can raise a score by paying us. Where a provider scores well overall but is wrong for a particular business type, the verdict says so explicitly rather than hiding it in a caveat.

4. Review cadence and dating

Pages covering the offer, pricing and regulatory status are re-verified on a quarterly cycle at minimum, and immediately if we notice or are told that terms have changed. The date shown as "Last reviewed" is the date the facts on that page were last checked against source — not the date of a copy edit, and not an automatically bumped timestamp. Offer terms were last verified on 29 August 2026.

If a page's figures cannot be re-verified because a provider has withdrawn or changed a product, we update the page to describe the change or unpublish it. We do not leave a dead offer live because it still earns.

5. Our commercial relationship, and the firewall

refer200 is a Tide referral partner and may earn a commission when someone opens a Tide account through a link here. refer200 is published by Five Thirty Ltd and has no other financial relationship with Tide: no retainer, no payment per word or per page, no equity, and no shared staff.

The firewall, stated concretely:

• Nobody at Tide, or at any other provider, sees a page before it is published.
• No provider has approval, sign-off, veto or advance-notice rights over our copy.
• Commission rates do not influence review scores, table order or which products we cover.
• Negative findings — high fees, support failures, missing features, weak protection — are published as found, on the same pages that carry referral links.
• Every monetised page carries a disclosure before the content, not in the footer.
• If Tide stopped being a defensible recommendation for a given reader, we would change the recommendation and keep the page, even at the cost of the commission.

We also decline things: paid guest posts, links inserted into existing articles, "sponsored review" arrangements, and any request to remove a drawback in exchange for commercial terms.

6. Independence and the limits of what we do

refer200 is a publisher. We are not a bank, an e-money institution, a broker or an adviser; we are not authorised or regulated by the FCA; and nothing on this site is financial, tax or legal advice or a personal recommendation. We describe products and offers so you can make your own decision, and we tell you where to read the binding terms yourself.

7. Use of AI

AI tools may assist with drafting structure, summarising our own notes or checking readability. They are never the source of a fact, a figure, a score or a verdict, and no page is published without a named human author reading it in full and a human verifying every figure against source. There are no AI-generated bylines on this site.

8. Corrections

If something is wrong, we fix it, and we distinguish between kinds of fix rather than calling everything an update:

• Material factual error. A wrong fee, bonus amount, eligibility rule or protection claim. Corrected as soon as verified, the reviewed date is updated, and the change is noted on the page where a reader could have acted on the wrong figure.
• Out-of-date figure. Accurate when published, since changed by the provider. Updated at the next check or immediately if flagged, with the reviewed date reset.
• Clarification. Correct but capable of being misread. Rewritten for clarity without a correction note.
• Typographical fix. Spelling, grammar or formatting. Fixed silently; the reviewed date is not changed, because no fact was rechecked.

To report an error, email contact@refer200.co.uk with the page URL, the specific claim and, if you have it, the source that contradicts us. We aim to acknowledge within two working days and to correct verified errors immediately. Our contact page explains what we can help with — we cannot access your Tide account, chase an application or intervene in a dispute with a provider.

9. Privacy and tracking

We do not run analytics, advertising pixels or cookie-based profiling on this site, which is why you see no cookie banner. What we do and do not collect is set out in our privacy policy and cookie policy.

10. What we will never do

• Publish a figure or claim we cannot trace to a provider's own terms or a named regulator.
• Run sponsored content, paid placement or paid link insertions without labelling them.
• Let a commercial relationship change a verdict, a score or a table position.
• Present ourselves as Tide, as FCA-authorised, or as providing advice.
• Leave an expired offer, a withdrawn product or a stale fee live because the page still converts.
• Describe a partner code as something it is not — REFER200 is a Tide partner referral code, and we say so wherever it appears.

Who is accountable for this policy

Tony Hargreaves, Editor and publisher, refer200, owns this policy and signs off every published page. Daniel Okoye, Compliance and regulation writer, fact-checker, fact-checks regulatory, protection and tax claims. Priya Raman, Reviews lead, owns the testing protocol and the scores. Their full profiles, including areas of expertise and direct contact addresses, are on our about page.