PayPal launches Money Pools feature to help you pool money for group payments
or get paid back Tweets: Ben Basche / @basche42 : That reminds me: Keep an eye on what Airbnb does with Tilt http://twitter.com/... Ingrid / @ingridlunden : This is more like Tilt than GoFundMe, PayPal says. Not intended for open-ended crowdfunding (a problematic area for PayPal in the past). https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Group money-pooling was pioneered by startups like Tilt, whose peer-to-peer expansion targeted international markets neglected by Venmo — proof the mechanic had demand beyond US friend groups. With Money Pools, PayPal absorbs that mechanic into its own wallet, while Ingrid Lunden's reporting notes PayPal is explicit that this is 'more like Tilt than GoFundMe': closed-group collecting and reimbursements, not open-ended crowdfunding, an area that has been problematic for PayPal in the past.
First-order effects
- PayPal users get native group collection and payback inside the wallet, removing the need to route group expenses through standalone apps like Tilt or through Venmo.
Second-order effects
- Tilt loses its core differentiator to a platform with a far larger user base, pressuring it to compete on the international and event-vertical niches it carved out rather than on the pooling mechanic itself.
Third-order effects
- The boundary between group payments and fundraising proves porous: PayPal stayed out of open-ended crowdfunding here, yet by 2020 it launched the Generosity Network, a GoFundMe-style service capped at $20,000 over 30 days — and Block's Cash App followed with its own Pools feature accepting Apple Pay and Google Pay contributions in 2025, confirming group pooling as table stakes across P2P wallets.
The trend: Peer-to-peer wallets are converging on group-payment features as a standard capability, with each player gradually testing how close it can sit to open-ended fundraising without triggering the compliance problems that kept PayPal cautious.