Company information
Chime is an American neobank, headquartered in San Francisco, California. The founders, Chris Britt and Ryan King, launched it in 2013 on the Dr. Phil show. It is aimed at being an alternative to the traditional method of banking followed currently in the world.
The unique aspect of Chime, is that it does not have any physical office, and all its banking services, are provided with the help of the chime app. Opening a bank account is completely seamless and hassle free, as the company's biggest objective was to avoid the long queues that we constantly face in the physical banks. It has grown hugely in popularity, with an astounding 8 million users being recorded during the start of 2020.
Who is it for?
With the internet's huge reach today, most of us tend to lead a bigger part of our lives online, rather than offline. For its target audience, Chime reaches out to people relatively familiar with the internet and technology, and are comfortable using it.
Key Features:
- Types of Accounts being offered – Chime offers to its customers, 3 types of accounts:
- Spending Account - It comes along with a Visa debit card, provided free of charge. There is no maintenance fee that the customer has to pay either. Replacement of the card is provided free of cost.
- Credit Builder Account – This credit card helps customers build their credit score and history. Money can be moved from the spending account to this account, to compensate for the amount that you have paid through this card. The safe credit feature in this, will allow for automatic payment of the balance amount every month, to maintain a good credit score.
- Savings Account - Helps the customers build their savings.
- Get Paid Early – With the direct deposit feature of Chime, you can now gain access to the money being deposited into your account almost immediately after it is made available. This is about two days earlier, than what most traditional banks offer to their customers. Once you set up direct deposit with Chime, you shall be provided with a pre-filled direct deposit from, which you can then give your employer to start using this feature.
- Automatic Savings – This feature of chime helps its customers build their savings over time. Every time money is deposited into your spending account, a certain percentage of it shall be transferred to the savings account.
Another important aspect of this feature is, every time you pay with the Chime Visa Card, it will automatically round up the paid amount, and send the balance to the savings account. For example, if you pay $29.5 at the grocery store, this feature will round up this money to $30, and transfer the $0.5 to the savings account. - Fee-less Overdraft – Through this feature, members of Chime can now access an overdraw on their account up till $100, without paying any fee. After this, the account cannot be overdrawn anymore, but there shall be no fees charged for the negative balance. There is no minimum balance that the account holder has to maintain at all times.
Pros and Cons of Chime:
Pros
- Quick and easy opening of accounts – Accounts can be opened on chime in as less as two minutes, through a completely online and streamlined process.
- Proper Management of Money – The various features of Chime, help the customers manage their money in a better manner, at a much cheaper price.
- Innovative Features – The features provided in Chime, are rather innovative and helps solve real-world problems faced by the younger generation today.
Cons
- Trust of Customers – Since there is no physical office available for customers, it may be difficult to gain the trust of customers.
- Good Knowledge of Technology – Using this app requires the customers to have quite sound knowledge of customers. Hence, it can be rendered unusable for a large part of the older generation, and the technologically unsound.
Bottom Line:
However, Chime’s mission is to ensure that all their members have financial peace of mind at all times. They want to make managing money easier, for each one out there, with absolutely no discrimination.
Chime truly cares about its customer, and does build its own profits at their expense. Instead, it aims to help them build profits while simultaneously building its own profits,
