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Pardna and Partner Hand in the UK: Run One in an App

Pardna, partner, pardner hand: the savings circle the Windrush generation brought to Britain, and that families still run today. Here is how it works, where it came from, one thing every banker on benefits should know, and how to run one in an app.

By The SUSU App team · Updated

How a pardner hand works

Everyone in the group, each a pardner, pays the same fixed sum at regular intervals, say £20 a week. Each week one pardner takes the whole pot, their hand. One person, the banker, collects the money and holds it until it is paid out. When every pardner has had a hand, the pardna ends.

That is how the Bank of England Museum describes it, writing with Museumand, the National Caribbean Heritage Museum. It is the same thing a Ghanaian family calls a susu, a Nigerian one an ajo or esusu, and economists a rotating savings and credit association. Nobody earns interest and nobody pays any: over a full pardna, you get back exactly what you put in, all at once instead of a little at a time.

Where it came from

The Bank of England Museum and Museumand trace community saving like this back to Africa, where it can be followed as far back as 3000 BC. Enslaved Africans in the Caribbean used it to save towards buying their freedom, and after slavery ended in 1838, banks in the British West Indies often made it hard for low-paid African workers to use them.

The Windrush generation brought the pardner hand to Britain, and needed it here too. Opening a bank account could mean a minimum period of residence, matching capital or a financial track record that newcomers did not have, and some banks treated large regular deposits, really pardner payouts, as suspicious. The pardna gave families a lump sum when they needed one, for big things from holidays to home appliances. The museum ran an exhibition on it, Pardner Hand: A Caribbean answer to British banking exclusion, from June 2023 to December 2024.

The banker’s problem

The banker is the weak point of a traditional pardna, through no fault of their own. They hold everyone’s money between collection and payout, keep the record in their head or a notebook, and chase anyone who is late. If they fall ill, move away or make a mistake, the whole circle depends on sorting it out.

There is a less obvious risk too. If the banker claims Universal Credit, GOV.UK’s guidance counts money “that belongs to someone else, but is in your name” when it works out their savings. A banker holding the pot in their own account can find other people’s money counted as theirs.

If you claim Universal Credit

The guidance counts money in your bank account as savings, so a draw sitting there can count too. Under the GOV.UK guidance, savings under £6,000 do not affect your Universal Credit; between £6,000 and £16,000 your payment goes down by £4.35 a month for every £250; above £16,000 you are usually not entitled to it at all.

A pardna with a big hand can push someone over a line for the month the draw lands. If that could be you, read the guidance, report changes as it asks, and keep the hand within what you are comfortable with. This page explains the published rules; it is not benefits advice.

Running a pardna in The SUSU App

The app works in the UK and takes the banker’s job away without changing how a pardna works:

  • Nobody holds the pot. Each hand moves from the pardners to whoever’s turn it is through Stripe, the payments company, so no banker’s account ever has other people’s money in it.
  • The order is fixed and visible before anyone pays in, and every payment is recorded where every pardner can see it.
  • Everyone verifies their identity with Stripe before they join.
  • Everyone in a pardna lives in the same country. A UK pardna is UK members only; a cousin in Jamaica or New York cannot join it. Running a susu abroad explains why.
  • It is free to join. Fees come out of each hand when it is paid: 5% for the app, plus Stripe’s own costs at no markup. The payout calculator estimates them, and the app shows every fee before a hand is paid.

The rules that still matter

An app does not choose your pardners for you. The things that made a good pardna work in the 1950s still do: people you know and trust, a hand everyone can afford every single week, and an order agreed before the first payment. How to start a savings circle goes through each decision.

And a pardna never pays out more than its pardners put in. Anything that asks you to “gift” money to a stranger and recruit others for a bigger return is a chain-gift scheme, and inviting people into one is a criminal offence in the UK. Here is how to spot one.

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