Greg Stanger, ICONIQ Venture Partner (00:20): Chris, can’t thank you enough for being here. This is a conversation we’ve been looking forward to having, and really excited to hear your thoughts and to share them with our community.
Chris Britt, Founder and CEO, Chime (00:29): Thanks so much for having me, Greg.
Greg Stanger, ICONIQ Venture Partner (00:31): Really appreciate it.
Chris Britt, Founder and CEO, Chime (00:32): Yeah.
Greg Stanger, ICONIQ Venture Partner (00:32): Why don’t we dive in. You started this company in 2012, I think, to essentially serve the needs of everyday Americans who were often overlooked, sometimes perhaps not even well treated by the traditional banks. Maybe just share with us a little bit about the moment when you said, hey, this is a customer that I want to serve, this is a company that I need to start.
Chris Britt, Founder and CEO, Chime (00:57): I’d be lying if I didn’t say I saw an attractive business opportunity in building this business, but it’s actually more personal than that. As you know, I grew up just outside of the Bronx in an apartment with my mom and my two siblings. Parents divorced, neither went to college, so I experienced firsthand regular everyday people growing up.
I got lucky to get a scholarship to go to a private school and in my apartment directly below me lived a man named Joe. Joe took me under his wing. My mom was working, selling vacuum cleaners door to door, hustling,
(01:32): teaching us all work ethic, and he just looked out for me like a grandfather. He eventually supported me, paid for me to go to the private school and ultimately to go to college as well. That experience, it obviously sounds wild to actually do that, but it just changed the direction of my life.
Just thinking about how education and access can change the trajectory of people’s lives, I’ve always felt a very close connection to our mission to help unlock financial progress for everyday people, and that’s really what we’ve aimed to do. It started with a bank account that didn’t rely on fees and helped people in the core areas that are most pressing related to their financial wellness.
Greg Stanger, ICONIQ Venture Partner (02:16): Let’s talk for a minute about, I think the phrase “financial empowerment” is one that gets a lot of play within Chime. What does that mean to you? How does it show up within Chime?
Chris Britt, Founder and CEO, Chime (02:27): I think the thing that we realized in terms of this huge segment of America, it’s about 75 percent of people in America who roughly make under a hundred thousand dollars a year, and about two thirds of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. So the result of that is that people just generally have anxiety around their money.
(02:46): They sometimes feel like they don’t know where they stand, and that the incumbent bank partner they might work with isn’t necessarily that focused on trying to help them. We’ve been very conscious from the earliest days of creating a brand, but more importantly an experience, that gave people confidence that we were going to look out for their best interests, keep them connected to their balances, give them access to their money as quickly as possible.
As you know, about 70 percent of our revenue comes from payments-driven revenue, so when people use their cards, online transactions or in person. That’s primarily how we monetize, through Visa when they pay us. What we like about that is it creates a business model that’s unique for banking because it’s aligned with the consumer. We have to earn our position as the top-of-wallet card every day, and if we do that, then we work out economically. Things happen for us.
And that’s very different than how a lot of the incumbents serve this everyday consumer segment, which is more focused on a little more nickel-and-diming, a little bit more fees for a low balance.
Greg Stanger, ICONIQ Venture Partner (03:55): Going back, when I think about when we first met, you described it for us, and you talked about these everyday Americans and you talked about no fees, and now we’re sitting here in 2025. How have you stayed so close to that vision and not veered off the path?
Chris Britt, Founder and CEO, Chime (04:10): Well, I would say we are certainly battle tested from the early days when we had a lot of skeptics. So many, many people passed on investing in Chime. We knew from the earliest days that the best way to serve this everyday consumer is by developing primary account relationships, generally direct deposit relationships, and most investors said, God, Chris, why would you start with that? Yes, it’s the most valuable relationship in financial services, but it’s the hardest one to cultivate.
We knew that if you were successful in developing the trust of a primary relationship, there’s no shortage of ways to monetize the relationship. We prefer monetizing through payments, but there’s obviously lots of additional opportunities to add services that we can offer in a low-cost way to help people make progress in their lives. So yeah, that vision’s actually never really changed, and I think it really does create a unique advantage for us because we’ve been able to develop that and be known as a service that you use for primary banking services, which is a little bit different than some of the other fintech apps.
Greg Stanger, ICONIQ Venture Partner (05:18): Yeah. When you think about that relationship of trust that you were just describing, it doesn’t sound high tech, it doesn’t sound profitable, it just sounds kind of straight down the middle. But you’ve built an enormous amount of technology that sits underneath all of this, and our thesis, a big part of that is just hearing you and your co-founder Ryan talk about all that you were building that was going to take cost out of the equation so that you could be effectively the most efficient bank, digital or otherwise, and serve your customers in a way that was no fee and still a profitable business.
Chris Britt, Founder and CEO, Chime (05:53): I think what really drove that for us was actually a challenging event. If I think back in our history and just some of the most memorable moments, sometimes the best opportunity to grow is from these challenging times. In 2019, we had a situation where our third-party processing system had an outage for a few hours. I remember—
Greg Stanger, ICONIQ Venture Partner (06:11): I remember it.
Chris Britt, Founder and CEO, Chime (06:11): It was a brutal time, and man, Ryan and I, I don’t think Ryan slept for a couple of days. It was really just one of these moments in the company culture where we saw everyone across the company step up. Recruiters, finance people answering customer service questions and so forth.
I remember struggling with how to communicate to our members in an authentic way, taking accountability, owning it, and sent this note out to millions of people and just got the most incredible feedback ever. I thought people were frustrated. I won’t say they weren’t angry because—
Greg Stanger, ICONIQ Venture Partner (06:51): They didn’t have access to their money for those few hours.
Chris Britt, Founder and CEO, Chime (06:53): For a few hours there. But the feedback we got, it was this incredible love for our product and service. Kind of like, hey, we understand that sort of thing happens from time to time, but I love you guys and we’re with you for life.
It was just one of these moments where you realize how incredibly important a role we play in our members’ lives and that we can’t take it for granted, and we have to make sure that we do everything in our power to make sure we have an always-on service. It was that moment in time that really drove us to decide that we would own our own core. We would build it, and we built it, and now we operate our own core, which I think is quite a bit differentiated relative to other companies in the bank space or fintech space.
Greg Stanger, ICONIQ Venture Partner (07:34): Absolutely.
Chris Britt, Founder and CEO, Chime (07:34): We can prioritize enhancements how we want to do it, and make sure that we have full control of our destiny and that we’re taking care of our members.
Greg Stanger, ICONIQ Venture Partner (07:44): So I guess that really has manifested itself in the product strategy very fully.
Chris Britt, Founder and CEO, Chime (07:49): And then we do our best to try to celebrate that and profile people that are making good progress or other people that just fit our ethos, giving back to the community in some way. We do this thing where we celebrate what we call change makers, and we honor people that are doing positive things in their communities who also happen to be Chime members.
Greg Stanger, ICONIQ Venture Partner (08:09): Oh, amazing.
Chris Britt, Founder and CEO, Chime (08:10): People assume that if you’re only making 35, 45, 55 thousand dollars a year, yes, a lot of these folks are living paycheck to paycheck like I did growing up, but these are people that aren’t down on their luck. They’re living their lives, they’re giving back to their communities, they’re volunteering, and so we do everything we can to try to celebrate our members and make sure that we’re doing everything we can.
Greg Stanger, ICONIQ Venture Partner (08:37): Tell us about the Chime Scholars program and what you’ve built there and how that’s working and what it’s all about.
Chris Britt, Founder and CEO, Chime (08:42): I’m incredibly proud and excited about the Chime Scholars Foundation. We took the 1% pledge, so we took 1 percent of our equity, and the basic concept is to help people that need a little bit of a—
Greg Stanger, ICONIQ Venture Partner (08:55): And it’s amazing, sorry to interrupt, but 1 percent when you made this pledge was probably, you didn’t have the same numbers in mind that perhaps we’re thinking about today. And in absolute terms, it’s—
Chris Britt, Founder and CEO, Chime (09:05): Let’s hope, yeah, it should be.
Greg Stanger, ICONIQ Venture Partner (09:06): It should be a decent size.
Chris Britt, Founder and CEO, Chime (09:07): Should be pretty well funded. It’s incredibly exciting. So we’re helping people, including people from sort of non-traditional backgrounds. This isn’t just for four-year elite colleges and that sort of thing. It’s for everyday people.
Last year we gave about 500 scholarships. We do up to 20,000 dollars of scholarships over the course of four years, and our goal is over the next few years to get to 10,000 scholarships. It isn’t just for Chime members or their families, but we obviously see—
Greg Stanger, ICONIQ Venture Partner (09:39): Some of them are Chime members.
Chris Britt, Founder and CEO, Chime (09:41): We do get some Chime members. We think it’s important for corporations to also set a good example. There’s lots of places to focus. Ryan and I chose education in large part based on some of the background that I have.
Greg Stanger, ICONIQ Venture Partner (09:52): Yeah. At ICONIQ, we’re very focused on impact and we love what you’re doing, and I feel proud also to be part of it. Let’s talk about the future a little bit. We’re sitting here now, we’ve talked about how far you’ve come. Fast forward 10 years, 20 years. Tell me what Chime looks like.
Chris Britt, Founder and CEO, Chime (10:11): I appreciate you bringing up generational. That is exactly how we think about
(10:15): this company and this brand. Chime is already, among consumers that make up to a hundred thousand dollars a year, the number three banking brand in America, and we’re not a bank. We partner with banks for the deposits. So Chime is only behind JPMorgan and Bank of America today in terms of unaided brand awareness, and I think that sort of sets the stage for us and our opportunity to continue to grow and become the primary account relationship for people making up to about a hundred thousand dollars a year of income.
We want to be the number one by market share in that category. Looking into the future, given where we are today, we think that is attainable. We’re going to keep—
Greg Stanger, ICONIQ Venture Partner (10:57): Given all that you’ve done, it seems like it ought to be within your—
Chris Britt, Founder and CEO, Chime (11:00): We’re going to keep adding on—
Greg Stanger, ICONIQ Venture Partner (11:01): —ambition.
Chris Britt, Founder and CEO, Chime (11:02): —new products and services to drive more engagement. We’re going to continue to be known as the company where you set up your direct deposit and use it as a primary bank account and basically as the center of your financial lives.
Greg Stanger, ICONIQ Venture Partner (11:16): Let’s talk about leadership a little bit. Of all the founders we’ve worked with, you and Ryan are certainly right up among the most exceptional of them, and at the same time, you’ve built a team that’s extraordinary in its own right. What are just some thoughts around how you wind up with a team like the one you have?
Chris Britt, Founder and CEO, Chime (11:35): I think it starts with hiring exceptionally talented people, and clearly we have a very high bar for that. But I think we’re also really lucky in that the focus of the company, the mission of the company, allows us to attract people who are excited about that mission and really passionate about it.
I think a lot of people that we’ve been able to recruit just really connect with struggling a little bit financially based on how they grew up and so forth, so that really serves as an advantage to us in terms of bringing top-tier talent who are passionate.
Greg Stanger, ICONIQ Venture Partner (12:07): Chime is obviously a mission-driven company. What advice do you have for other founders who are inspired by what you’ve done?
Chris Britt, Founder and CEO, Chime (12:15): This was my first time as a CEO, and I remember one of the first most important hires we ever made was a woman named Melissa Alvarado, who I hired as—
Greg Stanger, ICONIQ Venture Partner (12:23): Melissa, yeah.
Chris Britt, Founder and CEO, Chime (12:24): —Director of Analytics and Growth. In one of our first meetings, I had recruited her for about a year before she actually joined the company, and she asked me, well, tell me about your core values. And I didn’t have them at the tip of my tongue to articulate. She’s like, well, you don’t have them on the wall. Why don’t we have to do that?
I’ll never forget how important that was to her, and she was so right, because by being—
Greg Stanger, ICONIQ Venture Partner (12:48): You had them, but to articulate them.
Chris Britt, Founder and CEO, Chime (12:49): We had them, but we just thought, well, of course we’re just going to hire people that are kind of wired like us. So I would say take the time to make sure you understand what your mission and your vision is. It might sound hokey, it might sound unnecessary when you’re just trying to survive to the next financing round, but I think that’s critically important. It sets the tone.
And then, like the old saying goes, you’ve got to hire fast and fire faster if it’s not working out. I hate to sound ruthless about it, but you’ve got to get going. You’ve got to deliver the results that you promised to get to that next milestone, and so sometimes you’ve got to be—
Greg Stanger, ICONIQ Venture Partner (13:22): We all have responsibilities that extend beyond ourselves.
Chris Britt, Founder and CEO, Chime (13:25): That’s right. Sometimes you’ve got to be tough, so make sure you’re ready to make those sorts of tough decisions. But ultimately, you never go wrong by just focusing on the segment you serve, the customer you serve. Make sure you really understand what their needs are, and then make sure you hire really talented people around you to help you execute that.
Greg Stanger, ICONIQ Venture Partner (13:43): Chris, this has been a terrific discussion. Thank you so much for sharing all that you have that’s been both personal and business. It’s really been great to talk with you today.
Chris Britt, Founder and CEO, Chime (13:51): Thanks for having me. It was a great chat.
