In this Q&A, Ellis Taylor, CEO and Co-Founder of Glyde, shares how personal frustration with opaque FX markups led him and his brother to build a transparent, self-serve currency platform for SMEs. From technical and regulatory hurdles to sustainable pricing, customer education, and future growth plans, Ellis explains how Glyde is putting small businesses back in control of their international payments.
What motivated you and your brother to launch Glyde, and how did your early FX brokerage experiences shape its mission?
The motivation behind Glyde came from personal frustration having previously worked as a broker in the FX space. It was clear that SMEs wanted simple, self-serve currency solutions, as long as they were easy to understand and execute. Yet, legacy brokerages have no incentive to hand over that autonomy, because doing so would limit the hidden fees and margins they quietly extract on every transaction. With Glyde, our goal isn’t just to bring greater transparency, it’s to give control back to the businesses that want to take ownership of how they move money globally.
SMEs currently face opaque FX margins. Can you explain how traditional brokers exploit these businesses and how Glyde offers a fairer alternative?
Traditional FX brokers often embed hidden mark ups into every currency exchange, quoting rates that look competitive but are quietly padded far below the real market rate. These additional costs aren’t shown as fixed fees, making it nearly impossible for SMEs to understand what they’re truly paying, and while not all brokers exploit this model, the reality is many do. Pricing is discretionary, meaning two similar businesses can receive very different rates based solely on negotiation strength or broker agendas. It’s an archaic system that too often rewards opacity over fairness.
Glyde is an FX platform that eliminates that opacity entirely. The interbank FX rate is visible for our consumers across our dashboard ; every cost tied to each transaction is clearly broken down. You’re not just getting access to low margin pricing and online execution, you’re removing the risk of hidden spreads, sales-driven markups, and guesswork altogether.
How does Glyde’s model of letting SMEs set their own exchange rates work in practice, and what has client feedback been so far?
Glyde offers automated, self-service limit orders that are built specifically for SMEs, simple to use, easy to understand, and designed to help businesses capture FX rates not yet available in the market. One of our early customers, Mebs, secured a rate of 1.36 just days after the market was sitting at 1.34, saving £1,000 on a single invoice. Mebs was so thrilled with the savings, they chose to invest in Glyde as a whole.
That’s real money back to the bottom line, achieved in just a few clicks. Of course, the market won’t always reach your target, so we’re introducing a feature that lets users set both a preferred rate and a worst-case fallback. That means your risk is protected, while still giving you access to upside, all with minimal effort. It’s a smarter way to manage currency exposure, and the SME is the one in control. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.
What were the biggest technical and regulatory hurdles you had to overcome when building a transparent FX platform from scratch?
The biggest technical challenge was the three and a half years my brother and I spent building the platform, bootstrapping with the small amount of profits we made from our white label product, and then executing it. We’re two brothers from a seaside town who are determined to self-build, raise venture capital, and get Glyde live in the market.It’s only the beginning of our business journey, and like all start-ups, there are huge challenges ahead – but they’re challenges we’re excited to face.
Charging a flat 0.2% fee is a bold move. How have you structured Glyde’s economics to remain sustainable while prioritising SME users?
We’re confident in Glyde’s economics. While we charge a flat 0.2% markup to keep things simple and transparent, our model is supported by tiered pricing across our core products, all clearly displayed within the platform. There are over 260,000 UK businesses moving money internationally, and we have a clear view of the market share we need to reach our forecasts. We can also service North American and European markets.
What also makes our strategy sustainable is how lean we run. We’ve automated large parts of our go-to-market motion, not just within the product, but across outreach, onboarding, and lead qualification. That allows us to scale fast without the need for a large headcount, keeping our cost base low while growing efficiently.
As a mission-driven family business, how do you maintain your values and culture as Glyde scales and takes on pre‑seed investment?
We’ve been intentional about building teams that genuinely share Glyde’s values. People rally behind what we’re doing because it speaks their language, Glyde was built as a real alternative to an industry that has consistently let SMEs down. That mission attracts the right people.
We’ve also formed partnerships that reflect who we are as a business. One that we’re especially proud of is with Hope and Homes for Children, we provide them FX at cost and support their fundraising efforts. From team half-marathons to and even a planned skydive, which I’m already having nightmares about! These initiatives keep us connected to our core value of helping small businesses with ambitious goals and further remind us why we started Glyde in the first place.
How do you educate and onboard SMEs that may be sceptical of abandoning legacy FX brokers for a new model?
We educate businesses with tools that genuinely serve them, tools that help us build trust through transparency. On our website we offer a free, instant cost calculator that reveals the real interbank exchange rate at the time of transfer, the hidden fee baked into the rate, and the margin the provider has taken.
We’ve had over 3,500 submissions in the last 2.5 years, and the data has been fascinating. One of the most powerful aspects of the calculator is that when someone uses it a few times, they often see different markups applied to similar invoices, exposing how inconsistent and opaque FX pricing really is. Businesses simply don’t know what they’re paying, and those price changes often come at their expense.
What role does technology play in ensuring Glyde can offer real‑time transparency and competitive rates?
Technology is at the centre of how Glyde delivers real-time transparency and competitive rates. Our platform removes the need for an intermediary at the SME level, something that large corporations and institutions have had the luxury of avoiding for years with access to sophisticated products. We take those same institutional-grade tools and translate them into simple, self-serve workflows that any business can use. The result is low-margin, transparent FX that puts SMEs on equal footing with the big players.
How do you measure Glyde’s impact on UK economic growth, and what metrics do you track to ensure you’re delivering real value to SMEs?
We see our impact on UK economic growth through the lens of SME empowerment. When businesses access better FX rates, retain more capital, and reduce friction in overseas trade, they grow faster, and that growth compounds across the wider economy.
To measure this, we track a few core metrics: average savings per transaction, volume moved through the platform, and repeat usage. We also monitor how much margin we’ve helped SMEs reclaim compared to traditional FX models, a figure that continues to grow every month.
Beyond the numbers, it’s the human impact that I love the most, like when one of our early clients saved £1,000 on a single invoice. Money like that can go a long way for SMEs, so it’s nice to humanise what our technology enables, real world benefits for small businesses that help facilitate their growth.
Looking ahead, what are your ambitions for Glyde’s product roadmap and global expansion over the next 3–5 years?
Right now, we’re laser-focused on short-term execution, it’s all about customers, customers, customers. We’ve built an incredible team who believe in our product, enabling us to remain agile and firmly rooted in our mission to support SMEs rather than profit from them.
We have a clear target in mind for our second round of funding, so the priority is driving strong monthly growth, deepening traction, and proving to the FX space that Glyde delivers real, repeatable value. While we do have global ambitions, the next 12 months are about sharpening our value proposition, expanding within the UK, and laying the groundwork needed for the scale-up phase; with product and automation at the centre of everything we do.
