Posted by Alumni from TechCrunch
November 14, 2024
PayPal is launching a few features that let users in groups pool money with friends or family, to collectively pay for trips, travels, gifts, and anything else. The company is launching this feature in the U.S., Germany, the U.K., Italy, and Spain ahead of the holiday season. 'Re-launching' might be the more appropriate verb here: PayPal actually had a pooling feature in place before, imaginatively called 'Money Pools.' This made its debut way back in 2017 ' quite possibly as a response to faster-moving startups coming up with the idea first and gaining some significant traction on the idea. However, PayPal shuttered the service globally in November, 2021. At the time, company did not fully explain why it shut down Money Pools, but it's notable that by 2021 there were a number of competing alternatives that didn't require all contributors to be PayPal users, which was one gating factor to Money Pools. It was also the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, and PayPal was more focused on... learn more