How Yahoo Finance wants to be the Uber of personal finance

John Detrixhe of Quartz writes about how Yahoo Finance has introduced a new tool for readers called Tanda that is an electronic money pool.

Detrixhe writes, “Users can join groups of five or nine people to meet short-term savings goals, like putting away money for a vacation or building up an emergency fund. Users pay installments into a pot for a set period of time and can choose when they receive their money. The first two-people to get their money pay a fee, while the last to receive a payout gets a small bonus.

“The concept, sometimes called a rotating savings and credit association (ROSCA), has been around for centuries. It works like this: Imagine five people decide to save $50 each over five months, with each person paying in $10 per month. One member of the group gets a $50 payout each month until the cycle is completed.

“Tanda is a 21st century version with some of the trappings that have helped make other sharing businesses successful. A user’s trust scoring metric is meant to demonstrate a person’s likelihood of default (Yahoo Finance doesn’t hold capital or reserves if someone doesn’t pay); higher scores allow users to participate in larger money pools. Rather than becoming a bank, Yahoo Finance is providing the Uber-like technology that facilitates the service, according to Simon Khalaf, the company’s head of media business & products. Tanda also has a Venmo-like activity feed and a chat feature.”

Read more here.