Yahoo Gives Up On Money Pool App Tanda

A few months after its launch, Yahoo announced it is shutting down Tanda for Yahoo Finance, an app that allowed small groups of people to save money together for short-term goals.

“With Tanda, we wanted to introduce the concept to mobile U.S. consumers for the first time,” Joanna Lambert, general manager of finance and tech at Oath, wrote in a blog post. “It was one of our first forays into designing products for the financially underserved, as we saw an opportunity to use the support and influence of peers to help people save rather than spend.”

As TechCrunch explained, the app used the concept of a “money pool” that allowed a group of friends to pay a set amount to a saving pot monthly, and every month someone takes the pot home. Tanda, however, wasn’t a gambling app, so friends did not take turns winning the pot. Instead, each user simply took turns claiming it, with the social element helping friends stay on track with their savings goals.

While the concept is popular in countries like Mexico and the Philippines, it failed to catch on in the United States. In fact, the app — which launched in January — didn’t even make it into the top 1,500 in the Finance category on the App Store. It had been installed around 37,000 times to date across both iOS and Android.

“While we garnered valuable insights around how consumers can benefit from financial planning tools and the opportunity for Yahoo Finance to offer a diversified suite of financial products, we’ve made the decision to begin sunsetting Tanda this week,” wrote Lambert. “Every trial run helps brands better optimize, and create a better experience for users. We’ve learned a lot from launching and running Tanda, and then scaling it back. Key learnings around audience segments, engagement rates, consumer preferences, and UX will inform the projects we are creating, and how we improve the ones that are already in the market to fuel future innovation.”