If you’ve seen our product roadmap, you might have noticed that we’re working on something called Emma Groups.
This feature lets you create a group between your friends and family. You can then use this group to track who’s paid for what, and who owes who money! Here’s a sneak peek of what the feature will look like 
What occasions can you see yourself using this feature?
Will this be available on the free version of Emma?
Might be hard to get significant numbers of friends/family onboard if it’s limited to one of the paid plans.
Yep Emma groups will be on the free version, so everyone will be able to use it 
Will they need to connect a bank account?
If that is a requirement, unwillingness to use open banking is another potential obstacle I see in getting friends/family to use it, compared to Splitwise for example.
Yep they’ll need to connect a bank account, as it’ll all be done on the app
We’ll need you to try and convince everyone that open banking isn’t something to be wary of 
Yes, I agree with you, but that’s what we are doing here. 
Friends and family will sooner or later turn to Open Banking. eheh
We’re nearly ready to officially launch Emma Groups 
This will live in the new Pay tab and will help our customers share their spending with friends and family.
You can see some more early previews here: https://www.figma.com/file/0lSCyQo59rW7QU50dVxqwo/Dev-Accounts?node-id=0%3A1
Hey everyone 
We’ve just started rolling out the Groups feature 
Just update the app, head to the new Pay tab, and swipe left to add/join a group.
(If you can’t see it yet, don’t worry - it is coming!)
This blog post should also help clear up any questions you have about using Groups, but as always, feel free to drop any questions, comments, and feedback you have about this new feature below 
Hey,
I love the idea of groups. Potential to bring together the best of Monzo and splitwise for splitting expenses.
A few suggestions/questions:
would be great if you could add an expense to a group from the transaction itself, rather than always going to the group tab. I’d like to be able to add to a group when looking at my analytics for the month or as in review expenses comes in. (If this is already possible - I haven’t figured it out)
when adding from the groups tab, would be great to be able to select multiple transactions instead of 1:1
are there plans to be able to automatically add recurring expenses/subscriptions to groups. E.g I’d love it Ito my house bills were automatically split with my partner.
do groups balances hit your net worth?
Thanks
Hey @lsto
Love both of the first ideas - I’ll pass them onto the rest of the team.
For recurring expenses, I’m not sure when that will be available but I can see a lot of people wanting to use the feature in a similar way to you!
And at the moment group balances are not included in the net worth calculation - do you think they should be?
The whole Pay tab is predicated on Emma users allowing access to contacts and some of those contacts being on Emma or willing to join, and happy to use OB. I think that’s a pretty high hurdle for creating a group.
Genuine question, but why would someone be concerned about giving access to your contacts?
General anxiety about sharing online. Lack of understanding about how the data is used. Risk of cyber attacks…
A few reasons. It’s more the fact that few contacts are likely to be on Emma that’s the problem
Whatsapp = sharing contacts = 2.5bn users worldwide. 
I didn’t say they were logical reasons! Family = older people = challenging
So, now that PayPal is ditching Money Pools,- PayPal discontinues Money Pools , Emma has a real opportunity here to capture a lot(!) of angry PayPal users, who used it to collect end of term teacher gift money, or local sports teams collecting for venue hire, etc
However, I’ve been reviewing Groups and I think it’s missing two key features
Thanks @lobbers - it would be amazing if we could capture that market 
For point 1, do you mean that you’d like to be able to select a specific person from the group to pay, instead of the transaction splitting between everyone?
Will there be an option to simplify group debts (similar to splitwise) where if I owe Jack £10 and Jack owes Alison £10 it simplifies to just be I pay Alison £10? I found that really useful back when I was a student and we had lots of little transactions in the group alongside big ones like bills.
Possibly better with an example…
I book a football pitch for a block of ten weeks for £500. I want to create an Emma group of 10 people (players including me) and send them a payment request for £50 each. Right now, it seems I have to send each one of them a request separately. I want to be able to adjust the split within the group (as some may pay me in cash) and I want to be able to request the rest of the money from all the other people at once from the group list. Even a request button for each person on that tab would be better.
This is my flatmate. He is excessively careful about all his information and it can be frustrating at times
