Introducing Pool

Today we’re excited to launch Pool, a new financial account* designed to make sharing, managing, and spending money together easier. Pool allows for co-ownership of funds, fine-grained spending controls and collaborative features that have not been available in most consumer accounts to date.

With a Pool, you can assign roles and permissions, and spend directly from your shared balance using a Pool Visa® Debit Card. We’re partnering with First Internet Bank and Visa®, two leaders in digital payments, to bring Pool to the world.

Over the past two decades, we’ve seen an explosion of digital tools that facilitate collaboration on projects, documents, designs, photos, files, software development and more. Yet it’s still difficult to manage money collaboratively without a business entity or a business bank account. We are bringing the most useful features of business banking to consumers.

Here’s what you can do with a Pool:

• Create a Pool for free and add multiple users to one account
• Connect any bank account, fund your Pools, and move money between your Pools and your bank easily.
• Spend management: debit cards for any or all members of your Pool, and spend from the same shared balance, creating clear attribution and transparency of spending
• Run your Pool however you want with granular permissions and per-user roles: Admins, Spenders, and Viewers

Most money sharing tools lack shared spending functionality, require meticulous receipt tracking, or insist on full access for all members. This creates a lot of friction and administrative pain. Pool has been designed from the ground-up as a new type of account that enables collaboration around finances without sacrificing control or security. Shared money is not just shared money – it’s shared dreams, shared ownership, shared goals and a shared life.

A product like this is badly needed

Collecting money and spending it together is not only painful, but rife with technical hurdles and inconsistencies. Managing money for others involves lots of administrative and emotional labor. Yet, more and more, this is how we live, work, and support one another. 

Imagine managing money for a six-person house with a spreadsheet and your personal checking account. Or becoming a classroom parent and needing to visit a bank branch to add a teacher to your class account. Joint accounts, personal accounts, and peer-to-peer accounts aren’t built to handle these multi-user situations. And the robust features available in business accounts may require the overhead of an EIN and a business entity.

Consumers have had the same pick of financial accounts for decades: checking, savings, CDs, joint accounts, and peer-to-peer accounts. While money splitting tools and peer-to-peer transfer apps have expanded the possibilities, a vast set of use cases aren’t accounted for.

The features needed to pool money with others, manage it safely, and spend it collectively are complicated and nuanced, and existing products don’t support these use-cases well. The world doesn’t need another tracking tool, spreadsheet, or fundraising app.

We know how hard it is to build consumer financial accounts

We’ve also been thinking about problems around consumer financial technology for a long time. Our team has experience building consumer financial products at places like Cash App, Square, Stripe, and a mobile app called Braid. 

At Braid, we spent four years creating a new kind of shared account. This was an enormous technical lift alongside a ton of legal, regulatory, and compliance work. Building a new type of account meant defining the parameters around how ownership actually worked, building a custom ledger to track multiplayer money movement across several different payment rails, and doing a lot of legal research around co-ownership of funds, especially in dispute scenarios.

This is why many other options only go part of the way – if you don’t architect your system from the start to support multiplayer ownership and money movement, you end up with a product that’s more like a clunky version of a traditional joint account..

We knew our customers wanted an easy way to manage money together. Our experience building Braid helped to shape how we’ve set up Pool to solve this problem from day one.

A fresh start

We couldn’t stop thinking about this problem. But we knew it would take a lot to get started – the barriers to onboarding even a single customer would be sky high. We’d need millions in capital and a dedicated bank partner. 

We reached out to some of our previous investors at Braid, and learned they wanted to help us try again. Pool has raised $4.5 million in venture capital funding led by Nick Chirls at Notation Capital/Asylum Ventures. We’re also excited to welcome new investors Coalition Operators, 47th Street Partners (Jaren Glover), Charge Ventures, Ritual Capital and an amazing group of seed funds and angel investors.

We’re also thrilled to partner with First Internet Bank to bring Pool to the world. Pool is a software tool, first and foremost. We are not a bank. While there have been a lot of changes to the bank partnership model over the past few years, we believe in the future of fintech/bank partnerships. First Internet Bank understands digital payments in a way few others can, as they’ve been living it since their 1999 launch as an online-first bank.

When we pool resources, we accomplish goals that are impossible to achieve alone. As we started building, we couldn’t stop coming up with ways to use Pool: a self-organized HOA, large extended families, side projects, food funds, gaming servers, community organization, shared house expenses, poetry collectives, nanny cards, band members, chess teams… the possibilities seem endless, and we can’t wait to see what else we can unlock.