From cards to conversations: How group payments could upend a decade of bank advertising

The American consumer banking industry has spent the better part of a decade competing on rewards, cashback, and points programs until the economics of doing so eliminated any meaningful margin advantage. With product differentiation effectively exhausted, customer acquisition has become one of the remaining areas for potential growth, and the spend required to pull it is staggering.

EmberPay, co-founded by Josh Steiner, Charlie Baker, and Micah Thomas, seeks to change that by presenting a new, social-driven payment method. The platform acts as a card product that lets groups pay together at the point of sale in real-time, removing the reimbursement step that existing apps have never been able to eliminate.

The rewards race left banks with nowhere to go

The trajectory of U.S. consumer banking over the last ten years follows a recognizable pattern: one institution improves its rewards offering, competitors match it, and many products in the category have become increasingly similar in functionality over time. The consumer, now trained to evaluate banking products almost entirely on surface-level incentives, has little reason to switch, and banks may face challenges in shifting customer perceptions in a cost-effective way.

Steiner's read on the situation goes further than margin compression. He contends that the rewards arms race also made genuine product utility harder to sell. “Competition among major banks has narrowed, with pricing pressures contributing to thinner margins and more limited paths to profitability," he says. When the category conversation is dominated by points and cashback, a product that offers a meaningfully better experience at the point of use struggles to cut through.

The next major consumer banking company, in his view, will not win by out-advertising its competitors or by stacking a more generous rewards scheme. It will win the way messaging platforms won: by becoming socially necessary. EmberPay, which Steiner built alongside CTO Charlie Baker and COO Micah Thomas, is designed around that premise.

The ongoing challenge of group payments

Splitting a bill is one of the most frequent financial interactions in everyday life. It is also a challenge for existing products to address at the moment it actually occurs. Most dominant payment apps are built around reimbursement, where one person pays, then chases the others afterward, and their architecture was never designed to do anything else.

EmberPay's premise is that the transaction itself, not the cleanup after it, is where the problem needs to be solved. The platform works by linking a group of users through a shared payment flow. When a bill arrives, one person taps to pay and the transaction is shared among the rest of the group, with no payment request required.

Until recently, building that kind of solution wasn't technically possible for anyone outside Apple's own ecosystem. That changed when Apple opened its NFC stack to third-party developers, giving outside companies direct access to the point of sale for the first time. "It's really rare to be able to create that big of a leap forward in terms of user experience," says Steiner, "and it's very much only possible because of this big variable change."

The practical implication, in Baker's framing, is consolidation. "Imagine opening Chase, Apple Pay, Splitwise, Venmo, and iMessage just to check your funds, pay a bill, calculate an expense, and request the money," he says. "NFC lets us save people time by auto-populating all the trivial information (what, where, when, and how much) so they can focus their attention on just the who."

But the friction EmberPay is trying to remove isn’t only logistical. The reimbursement model forces a social calculation before a financial one: is this amount worth the awkwardness of asking? Steiner's argument is that by settling payments at the moment they happen, the calculation disappears entirely. Thomas sees the behavioral result as straightforward. "When we reduce the fractured burden that group payments have always been, people may be more likely to split expenses," he says.

Retrofitting a point-of-sale joint-payment layer onto infrastructure built entirely around reimbursement would mean rebuilding the product from the ground up. Baker's technical work at EmberPay is what translates that newly available access into something deployable; Thomas's campus outreach strategy is what can help translate a deployable product into early measurable traction.

A payment infrastructure gap that has quietly widened

Originally from London and then relocating to San Francisco to build EmberPay, Steiner gained a comparative vantage point on payment infrastructure that most U.S.-native founders lack compared to how European payment systems work.

In the U.K. and across much of Europe, contactless payments at point-of-sale terminals became standard years ago. Customers tap and go, so the interaction between consumer, card, and merchant is fast and self-directed. In the U.S., the dominant experience at restaurants and bars remains a paper receipt brought to the table, a card taken away for processing, and a slip returned for a signature. Steiner suggests that parts of the U.S. payments experience remain less digitized compared to some other markets, noting that traditional practices such as presenting a receipt for card payment are still common.

Part of the explanation, in Steiner's analysis, is structural: American restaurants have an incentive to control the payment moment because that is when the tip is captured. Contactless, customer-initiated flows complicate that dynamic in ways that European service models, where tipping norms differ significantly, don't face.

The regulatory environment compounds the problem. "The banking and credit industry is a maze," Micah Thomas says, "but that's sort of the tip of the iceberg. Once you've sorted through the steps necessary to launch your product, you then have to make sure you're compliant without hurting the user experience."

EmberPay's bet is that consumer demand will eventually force modernization, and the NFC opening can greatly accelerate it.

The narrow window for a new kind of banking company

Steiner's long-term framing for EmberPay is not as a payments utility. He describes a small category of applications that achieve genuine universal adoption: products that essentially every person in a given market carries on their phone. That category is currently occupied by messaging platforms, social networks, and a handful of utility apps. No banking product has fully reached this stage, despite the fact that paying for things is among the most universal human behaviors.

For Steiner, existing banking products lack the network-effect dynamics that drive that level of adoption. EmberPay's joint-payment architecture is built so that each additional user makes the product more valuable for everyone already on it, the same flywheel that took WhatsApp from zero to ubiquity. This is why, as he puts it, "The North Star is to create one of those apps that everyone everywhere will have.”

EmberPay’s broader argument is this: the last decade of banking innovation moved money more conveniently after decisions were made. The next decade will be about integrating payments into the moment of social decision itself, and Josh Steiner, Charlie Baker, and Micah Thomas are building the company designed to own that layer.

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