For people who have decided to share their lives, combining their finances can be a daunting task. When people marry later in life, it is common for them to move in with someone before the wedding – if it ever happens.
This was the difficulty Michelle Winterfield faced when she moved in with her partner a few years before her wedding. They had the normal conversations, such as opening a joint account and using shared credit cards.
“It’s hard to build a life as an unmarried couple,” Winterfield told Total Bulletin. “And with couples getting married later on in life, there is an unwillingness to combine finances, but they still want to get the benefits of doing so.”
When Winterfield, a private equity investor on Wall Street, couldn’t find an app for what she called “the modern couple,” she and co-founder Daniel Couvreur, a former investment banker, decided to create one two years ago.
Tandem, a fintech app, targets couples’ initial financial milestones and grows with the relationship with planning, saving, and spending features. The subscription-based app was released in August 2023.
“We were both tired of using Venmo to share rent, groceries, and plenty of other expenses with our significant others, and we saw no appeal in a joint debit card/account – who wants to give up credit card points/cash back and deal with the pain of opening a joint account + combining finances?” Couvreur wrote in a LinkedIn post two years ago.
How it works
“It gives you the experience of a joint account without actually having to have one,” Winterfield said. “Everything you do want to share is in one space, so it eliminates the back-and-forth. You can also settle up any balances whenever you are ready.”
Tandem users can be up and running within minutes. A person logs on and invites their partner. Both connect their credit and/or debit cards. Tandem brings in transactions, but each partner only sees what the other wants them to see, Winterfield explained.
Couples can set up automated money transfers into a joint spending pot and allocate them to specific bills, such as rent or Netflix. Tandem presently serves over 25,000 couples and has managed $60 million in expenses to date.
Relationship goals
Tandem isn’t alone in pursuing this problem. We’ve previously covered companies that offer financial services to couples, such as Plenty, Honeydue, Zeta, Ivella, and Ensemble, which is for divorced people who co-parent.
Many of Tandem’s competitors focus on offering a debit card for sharing spending, which Winterfield believes is a significant step for people who are just getting started with their finances. Tandem crowdsources possible features from its user base, and the majority of users inspired the next set of features, “Goals,” which will go live this week. The Goals feature focuses on developing a plan for shared purchases that both members of the partnership will work on.