How To Split Bills Without Losing Friends Or Cash: These 25-Year-Olds Have An Answer
This social payments app might just be India’s answer to Venmo...
It’s not uncommon to be caught in a situation where we’ve been out with friends for a meal or a movie and decide to split the bill. Often we don’t have enough cash, and sometimes merchants don’t agree to split the bill among multiple cards. What does one do in that case?
It turns out that a couple of 25-year-olds from Delhi have devised a solution for every millennial’s social problem and it goes by the name of MyPoolin.
Rohit Taneja, an IIT-Delhi alumnus co-founded MyPoolin with Ankit Singh, an FMS Delhi alumnus in 2015. This Gurgaon-based payment startup was incubated by Investopad and is available on Android and iPhones. The duo from Delhi initially raised funds from a group of angel investors such as Sharad Sharma of iSPIRT, Rajan Anandan of Google India, Sunil Kalra, Amit Ranjan of Slide Share, Rohan & Arjun Malhotra of Investopad and ex-Googler Gautam Gandhi.
How Exactly Does It Work?
MyPoolin is a social and group payments startup which enables users to plan and pool money for movies, meals, parties, and trips, using a smartphone application.
Through this app, you can either “split & settle” or “plan & pay” with your friends. To illustrate, if you were planning to catch the latest movie this weekend, you could use the application to invite a group of friends to come along. You could keep track of whether they’ve dropped out of the plan and also decide how you want to split the bill. Originally, the application used wallets like Paytm or Mobikwik for such social payments, but UPI or the Unified Payments Interface has proven to be a game changer for the app’s founders. To that end, they’ve tied up with Yes Bank. Using Yes Bank’s UPI infrastructure, one can transfer money to their friends instantaneously. Since they are now using UPI, each transaction can be up to Rs 1 lakh. The app also allows you to ‘poke’ friends, politely reminding them to pay up.
MyPoolin: The Indian Venmo?
Venmo is a U.S.-based mobile-payment app that connects users to bank and credit card accounts, and then links them with friends to transfer money on a smartphone.
When asked if MyPoolin could be as revolutionary as Venmo for India by leveraging the strengths of UPI, Taneja said, “If you look at Venmo or WePay, they’ve had far more transactions than Alipay or PayPal in terms of frequency. We would say that a very important thing that comes into play is convenience. All the social layer with friends and feed actually comes on top of it. If there was no convenience, then there wouldn’t even have been a Venmo. With UPI, that layer has been established for us.”