Couples finance app Tandem bought by credit union group | Credit Union Journal

• Key insight: A university credit union’s acquisition accelerates its embedded family-banking product strategy.
• Expert quote: Reseda CTO Ben Maxim says Tandem can serve cohabiting students, siblings, and co-parents sharing expenses as well as couples.
• Supporting data: Married couples without joint accounts rose from 15% (1996) to 23% (2023), via U.S. Census Bureau.
  Bullet points generated by AI with editorial review

Michigan State University’s credit union has bought a couples budgeting app.
Reseda Group, a credit union service organization that Michigan State University Federal Credit Union owns, acquired the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based couples financial management app Tandem on Wednesday.

Reseda Group was one of Tandem’s earliest investors back in 2023, and buying the app advances both Reseda and Michigan State FCU’s goals of creating a full offering of in-house family banking products, according to the credit union.

“Tandem has been a valuable part of the Reseda Group ecosystem for several years, providing Gen Z and millennial couples with a digital solution for navigating their first money milestones and ultimately building their financial futures,” said April Clobes, president and CEO of both Reseda Group and MSUFCU, which are based in East Lansing, Michigan. “With Tandem now a part of our portfolio of products, we are taking our partnership of innovation to the next level.”

The Tandem app is designed to connect to multiple individual bank accounts and doesn’t require a joint account to use. A 2023 LendingTree survey found that 62% of American couples surveyed share at least one bank account, and the other 38% surveyed either don’t share expenses or don’t use a shared account to do so.

A September 2025 U.S. Census Bureau survey also found that the share of married couples without any joint bank accounts rose by more than half over the past quarter-century, from 15% in 1996 to 23% in 2023.

Ben Maxim, chief technology officer for MSUFCU and chief operating officer for its CUSO Reseda Group, sees Tandem’s offerings as an opportunity to serve groups of people who want to share finances without necessarily opening a joint account.

“We also see Tandem as an opportunity to expand not just with couples, but other groups of people that share expenses like groups of siblings caring for aging parents and divorced couples on the other side of marriage looking at sharing co-parenting expenses,” Maxim told American Banker. “Being a university-based credit union, we are also seeing a lot more students who are co-habitating with each other [off-campus] during college and post-graduation.”

Tandem has partnered with credit unions since its early days, according to co-founder Michelle Winterfield, starting with its enrollment in MSU’s Conquer startup accelerator.

“They have great offerings that we view as kind of underrated, honestly,” she said.

Maxim first met Winterfield and her co-founder Daniel Couvreur in 2022 through the Conquer accelerator.

“We had the opportunity to partner with them and get to know them through that program,” he said. “We thought it was a great fit for our membership, people who are students living together even after they graduate, because that was who the founders were. They were actually building something for their life situation. And I always find that founders that are solving problems that they’re experiencing tend to be more successful.”

As part of the acquisition, Winterfield and Couvreur will join Reseda Group as vice presidents and continue to develop the apps’ suite of family banking products.

“We started as expense sharing for couples as the gateway,” Winterfield told American Banker. “It’s the first financial interaction that they have together. From there, our vision was always to continue building on to the platform and kind of just serve whatever our households needed as they live through their lives. 

Maxim also sees an opportunity for new member recruitment for the Michigan credit union.

“With a couple app, one person in the couple was likely a [MSUFCU] member and the other one’s likely not,” he said. “The hope was to get that other person in the partnership to come over and be a member. For every Tandem member we get, we double the number of Tandem users over time. So we did see a little bit of an uptick in membership there. And then we had the great opportunity to make the acquisition in lieu of a funding round.”

Tandem currently operates with a “freemium” subscription model, with premium features such as instant transactions and unlimited automations accessible to users via a $12 monthly fee.

“We’re keeping it a direct to consumer app but looking to expand B2B capabilities in the future and look at that business model as we move forward,” Maxim said. “Our goal at Reseda is to build technology for the credit union industry and the community banking industry as a whole. We’re going to continue to maintain the relationships that Tandem had fostered and help grow them.”

Tandem previously had Texas-based Third Coast Bank sponsoring its “savings goal” feature, launched last year, that featured high-yield savings accounts. The app’s co-founders anticipate relaunching the tool, and building others like it, with accounts offered by MSUFCU after the acquisition.

“We ended up winding down our relationship with Third Coast Bank due to all of the volatility in the banking-as-a-service space,” Couvreur told American Banker. “It just reiterated to us that we really need to find the best partner. We believe we’ve found that in MSUFCU because of their knowledge in the space, their compliance function, their regulation, and everything that expands outside of technology. We’re excited to be able to relaunch and bolt on these additional financial products for our users in a really great way.”

“One of the reasons we were looking at buying Tandem was being able to bring in those deposits,” Maxim said.

Tandem is among many fintech-built budgeting apps in the market, and one of several built specifically for couples. Other couples money management apps in the market include Honeydue, Monarch Money, Plenty and You Need A Budget. 

Some money management apps have shut down in recent years, such as Intuit’s Mint budgeting app. Maxim claims that Tandem’s user interface makes it more attractive to modern consumers.

“In the case of Mint especially, people are no longer interested in seeing charts and graphs and having to know what to do with those,” he said. “They want to be told what to do. They want to have someone help guide them and concierge them through their experience. Tandem brought in a great UI and made it very easy to split expenses and budget in a way that was low-pressure.”