Opinions about Chime Bank

I wonder about their business model for long term viability. May work in short term with VC backing but doubtful it will be enough to support them once the money chunks are gone. Not sure what they offer beyond most small local banks.

I work at Chime. Our business model is extremely robust. Unlike Simple which created an online bank using off-the-shelf components that were expensive (so they couldn’t make an operating profit) and didn’t fit well together (so it was a little clunky, Chime founders spent 2-3 years building everything in-house so their overheads are very low. We make our money on the debit card nip. We took VC money (on very favourable terms) for customer acquisition. If we elected to stop spending $ on customer acquisition, we’d be instantly profitable. All our graphs look very promising. We just moved into a lovely spacious office just outside Union Square that 3x as large as our old office. We’re hiring because we want to be the only bank you’ll ever need and, in comparison to the likes of Wells Fargo and Bank of America, there are gaps in our offering that we’re well aware of and striving to fill ASAP. It’s a fun bunch of people who are very good at what they do. They’ve succeeded in implementing a hire-no-assholes rules so there’s very little politics or in-fighting. Perks are on a par with any good well-funded startups. It’s still small enough that an IC can make an impact. And the mission is something you can feel good about - helping the little guy/gal not get screwed by the Big Banks on fees and penalties.