Ivella is the latest fintech focused on pair banking services, with a twist – TechCrunch

Money can make people moody. There are teams with privileges, or lack thereof, that can make even the simplest conversation about bills feel like baggage to deal with. Translate that discomfort into relationships, and it can feel like a difficult – and fragmented – dance on who pays what bill when (and how).

Ivella, a Santa Monica-based startup, wants to build banking products for couples to remove some of these tensions. Led by CEO and co-founder Kahlil Lalji, launches the startup with a shared account product that has just raised $ 3.5 million in funding from Anthemis, Financial Venture Studio and Soma Capital. Other investors include Y Combinator, DoNotPay CEO Joshua Browder and Gumroad CEO Sahil Lavingia.

Lalji, who helped creators with digital content before jumping into the fintech world, says the startup was born of his own frustration at the expectation that couples would only use Venmo unless they were married. The best solution so far has been joint accounts: which means that two people will create an account where they – sing it with me now – merge with their accounts and withdraw from the same pool. Instead, Lalji wants to build a shared account: couples maintain individual accounts and balances, but get an Ivella debit card linked to both of these accounts.

With the shared card, couples can set conditions – perhaps prorata what percentage of each bill someone pays depending on their income – and Ivella will automatically split all transactions made with Ivella’s debit card.

This was in itself the biggest technical challenge Ivella was faced with in its early days, Lalji describes. He said peer-to-peer platforms still share payments “in a very rudimentary” way, while Ivella wanted to cut off transaction authorizations so that people are only charged what they state the relationship should be. “We have some real-time decision logic to find out what the balances of these two user accounts are? Can both users support the end of the payment based on the default split? If so, move the money and then send back an authorization.” The company developed an internal ledger to track the way money moves between user accounts, in a way that the co-founder believes many other fintechs do not.

That was not how the startup, well, started. The first iteration of Ivella looked like, he admits, a P2P transfer platform with better UX. The team soon saw problems: “One of the biggest failed methods from the previous iteration was that payments and payment networks only interact with one user account.” For example, if you were trying to make a $ 100 transaction where you and your partner had $ 50 each, it would decline the payment because it would only see one account; Or, conversely, if you only have $ 100 in your account but your partner has $ 0, the payment will be approved even if your partner does not have enough money to keep at the end of the trade.

“The place that many people fall short of, just like a lot of fintech falls short, is that they do not break the shape of how banking looks and feels,” said Lalji. “And because we’re specifically focused on couples, we want to build a product that doesn’t feel so sterile and not just like a bank.”

Ivella competes not only with the theory of joint accounts pressured by established banks, but also venture-backed startups seeking a multiplayer fintech world.

Braid, another startup working on social fintech, recently launched “Pools” as a twist on consumer payment links. People can set up a wicker pool around any effort – a fund for this summer’s Italy trip, shared petrol expenses for cars or a kitty for monthly book club snacks – and then send a link to friends who want to deposit money. then goes directly into the wallet and the creator can either manage it alone or with participants. The startup raised a $ 9 million seed round from investors, including Index and Accel, in 2020.

Zeta, which raised $ 1.5 million last year, wants to make joint accounts more collaborative and transparent. Many standard shared accounts only give each user full access to other users’ finances, while Zeta wants to give people a more flexible way to share money.

Zeta CEO Aditi Shekar told TechCrunch that she is looking at a strategy that aims to share finances as a response to a “temporary” mindset.

“Our focus is to work with couples who have reached the point in the relationship where they are less focused on splitting and more focused on sharing. It is a key difference in state of mind,” she said. value to deliver. “

She added that “we believe that when a couple share, there must still be flexibility around sharing … but the core dynamic is that you are a team working on your finances together.”

Lalji said Ivella will focus on products to support couples at all stages of their relationship, including joint accounts, credit products and joint investment products, long-term. Nevertheless, Zeta raises a question that Ivella needs to answer: Is the core clientele of their start-up – couples who are on their way to marriage / joint account, but who are not yet married / ready for joint account – large enough for venture? The recent increase says yes, but given fintech’s latest battle as a sector in general, Ivella must prove that it can keep the cost of customer acquisition low and sticky high.

Today, Ivella’s core strategy for revenue generation is through the revenue it earns from brokerage fees. Lalji said that points and rewards will be launched under a premium subscription that will include some additional features, such as being able to import and share transactions not made on the Ivella card.