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Pooling the Money

Taxi & Private Hire › Products › Surge › Pooling the Money

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Where the customer surge money goes. As surge is collected it is recorded into an immutable pool tied to its cluster, so the money is safe even after the original charge is archived. When a cluster ends, the pool is divided flatly among the drivers who were compliantly available — by each driver's share of the total available minutes — and paid out to them, with any late-arriving money topped up in the same proportions. The split is exact to the cent and safe to re-run. The pool always goes to the compliant drivers; only when a real surge drew no eligible drivers at all (or a pre-booked surge premium had no live pool) does the money fall to the company growth fund — never to the operator's cut or a single driver. The operator's cut is a capped lever, set to zero at launch.

The pool pays for showing up, not for trips

Surge has two halves. Customers pay a temporary uplift on their fare; that money doesn't go to whoever happened to take the surged trip — it collects into a pool and is shared among every driver who was compliantly available in the busy area while it lasted. Surge funds availability: the fare pays for the ride, the pool pulls supply toward demand. A driver earns the same pool credit whether their own trip was surged or exempt.

How the pool splits

When the cluster closes, the pool divides by a single, flat rule: each driver's share is their active minutes in the surge × their completion rate (trips completed vs assigned). More time available earns more; missing assigned work earns less. It is flat per minute — never weighted by how many or how lucrative the trips were — and the cents always sum back to exactly the pool.

Cluster pool €60 collected surge A Anna 60 active min · 100% completed weight 60 €30 B Ben 60 active min · 50% completed weight 30 €15 C Cara 30 active min · 100% completed weight 30 €15
Same minutes, half the completion rate → half the share (Anna vs Ben). Same completion, half the minutes → half the share (Anna vs Cara). The three shares sum to exactly €60.

Built to be fair, and to balance to the cent

The settlement is structural, not best-effort. The pool only ever pays out exactly what was collected; a late payment that lands after a cluster has settled tops up against the same frozen shares without ever double-paying; and if surge was charged in an area where no compliant driver was present, the whole pool goes to a growth fund — never to the operator.

Collected surge pool Drivers present → split by minutes × completion No compliant driver → growth fund (never the operator)
The operator takes no cut at launch — surge is operator-neutral by construction.

The customer side of the same surge is Surge Pricing; drivers opt in via Driver Subscribing.