Australia-based Fintech firm Groupee has introduced a real-time payment app that lets groups of people share the cost of products or services they purchase. For example, the app allows people to split the cost for a meal, gift, and tickets.
Groupee provides a prepaid Visa card that can be placed in a mobile phone in order to allow groups to share the cost of purchasing items among several different users.
Jarred Baker, CEO at Groupee, stated:
“In 2019, people don’t want to pay for their friends, simple as that. People do want to be able to share experiences with each other.”
Established in 2016, Groupee offers an app that easily lets people split the bill at restaurants. The company has expanded its services by allowing groups to share the cost for various other types of purchases.
The Groupee app may be used on any phone or at an Australian bank. At present, the app is not available in other countries, however, the firm intends to offer services in other areas. The app can’t be downloaded from the App Store for iPhone, but Groupee says it will soon offer the app on Google Play for Google Pay and Samsung Pay online wallet users.
The new Groupee platform was developed by millennial tech entrepreneur Jarred Baker, who spent more than a year updating the app’s technology and enhancing its original model, with the help of his team members, by removing the requirement of having to register retailers. Other similar apps in the market limit users to certain participating merchants in specific payment categories.
Baker noted:
“Paying with others is a fact of life in 2019 and is almost always a mess. My team and I have built Groupee because we have experienced the pain of the problem that it solves every day. My whole life is about sharing experiences with the people around me, but that doesn’t mean I want to be out of pocket to pay for them.”
He added:
“What makes Groupee’s ‘pay-share’ philosophy great is that you use Groupee in the moment. There are no delays, no paybacks, no transferring money between bank accounts, and no more chasing money from friends.”
Groupee’s management claims that the potential for the “pay-share” market in Australia is greater than AU$100 billion (appr. $70 billion) annually. The company says that millennials will most likely be the biggest and most natural adopters of its app.