As someone who uses Chime, I’m working on switching to other banks. It’s a nice starter digital bank but their savings rate has lagged most other banks and I’m not sure what killer features they have that SoFi/Ally/etc. don’t also offer now.

Best wishes to those affected, I’m sure there’s a lot of talent that won’t have trouble finding something new.

Yeah I started using it out of curiosity, its very bare bones and not sure why I would use it over Chase

The target market for these fintechs is typically your unsophisticated financial services consumer. Anyone else is better off at a commercial bank or brokerage, and I’ll go out on a limb and say the cohort I mention is better off there too if they select carefully to optimize for the services they need without the fees.

(I contribute at an org adjacent to deposit fintechs and was an early BankSimple customer)

Wait, does that mean chime offers no meaningful interest like chase?

I was an ally customer for the longest time and their app and website have degraded in quality. Login is abysmally slow and there have been multiple times I was not able to login at all. Recently switched to capital one 360 and so far so good.

I went to Chime from Simple, another app bank that eventually got triple-merged into one of the least mobile friendly banks out there. I still have like .12$ in some obscure bank. Recently I moved to use a simple top-5 bank account and it's fine as long as you know you'll never have overdrafts/you have a certain amount direct deposited monthly.

Really sad that banks like this can't figure it out, and when they do (Simple), they get bought out by legacy banks and fall into oblivion.

You must be able to lend to sustain yourself; interchange rev is insufficient (especially with FedNow instant payments almost GA), and even becoming a lender is hard. You need to partner with a bank partner who has a charter, you have to be able to securitize the debt, etc.

Banks have a serious moat. Go where the margin is, and that isn’t deposit accounts. Like airlines, they’re a utility masquerading as a business.

Digital banks are finding that you literally CANNOT make money with a simple checking account.

Banks make money with mortgages, loans, credit cards and other financial services. Hell banks would rather dump most of their customers if they were allowed to.

Is this true? With Simple I believe they were profitable, they just decided to sell to BBVA to grow larger (and to let the founders get a huge pay day). Then BBVA sold to PNC, then PNC absorbed all its users.