collaborative payment system

Question

How can I approach the idea of building a collaborative payment system? I've built a iOS chat app using Firebase and I'd like to add the functionality of allowing the members of a chat group to contribute an x amount of money where this money can later be utilized by the group admin.

For example, Alice creates a chat group for "Bob's birthday" and adds John and Kareem. They all want to pitch in to buy Bob a gift. John, Kareem and Alice all add $10 each through the "add money" button. Alice takes the $30 and buys the gift.

I've looked into PayPal and Stripe but they all seem to point towards 1-to-1 payments. How can I go about solving this? Thanks.

Answer 1

Stripe has a collaborative payments platform called Connect which seems what you're looking for. Failing that, you'd need some kind of white label system like PayByGroup (unknown what their fees are) or another middle-man payment scheme where you can hold payments and redistribute them using an API, like LiqPay or Skrill.