PayPal closes its Money Pools service

PayPal discontinues its Money Pools service after seeing no success

 If you are looking for PayPal money pools, then you already know that it no longer exists.

FIY, PayPal Money Pools became one of the most popular digital solutions to collect money online and was one of the first online alternatives to old school “whip rounds” – if you remember that brown envelope that used to get passed around the office.

And now, it’s been more than a year since PayPal closed their money pools service, leaving you high and dry searching for modes to easily collect money from a group umm…well search no more!

However, according to multiple media reports, the number one alternative to Money Pools may soon land in the United States of America.

Launched in January 2019, it (Money Pools service) was designed to make collecting money from friends easy and simple.

However, the reality was different. The feature was very complicated.

WHAT IS A MONEY POOL?

Try and understand like this.

In a nutshell, the Money Pool feature is basically a digital version of the paper envelope that used to get passed around when someone used it to collect cash for something.

It’s a way of simply and easily collecting money from a group of people, for a joint activity, purchase, or booking. The Organizer creates a money pool in the group and then shares the payment link in the group with the rest of the people.

Everyone in the group chips in, and once ready to withdraw, the Organizer can go ahead and book or buy the group item or activity. It can be used to collect anything that a group of people does together.

From holidays to sports, gifts to activities – wherever we need to book or buy as a group, people are going to need to pool money to make it happen.

Collctiv’s Chief Technology Officer, Pete Casson, reveals the issue:

The feature Money Pools was in the shadows within the PayPal app and was never really given the primetime treatment. In theory, it should have been hugely successful, PayPal has a customer base of over 337 million users worldwide that had instant access to Money Pools.

So, if it gained that much popularity, why are they closing it now?

According to PayPal officials, “This action will allow the firm to sharpen their focus on more specialized money-raising services” which doesn’t really tell us anything. My guess is that it simply wasn’t used that much or drove significant revenues. Why did it fail?

PayPal is constantly evolving, and we are updating its products and services constantly to make the user experience more awesome and to offer its million global customers a safe and trusted way to manage and move money.

POOR EXPERIENCE

“It was found out on our journey of building Collctiv that user experience and simplicity are everything and our aim with this was to make it incredibly quick and easy to collect money from a group of people”, Casson said.

“Now, the thing is, if there is anything that slows down the process or stops it from happening, it needs to be stripped out or overcome.”

Read more-These Tech Companies Are Doing Massive Layoffs

“In this, Money Pools felt always like it was a loss leader for PayPal, a feature to make customers use other PayPal services, it never became the main reason to use PayPal,” Casson added.

LOST FOCUS

“Money Pools never became the main focus for PayPal and felt like a secondary product giving an impression that it was created as customers demanded it rather than PayPal wanting to solve the customers’ problem of collecting money from friends”, Casson said.

“In this business, you have to be completely focussed on solving the customers’ problem as everything else is secondary, so do the primary goal really well first, the rest will follow”, added Casson.

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