What is Chime's messaging on its vision for where it aims to be in the next 5 years, and what is its thesis on achieving that goal?

People loved to throw the word super app around. I think a lot of these fintech companies had the desire to be the next super app. And by that I mean they wanted to do everything—give you a loan, give you a credit card, give you a debit card, pay your checks, whatever, sort of like large mainstream banks do. 

The name of the game was stickiness. The idea is that if you get a bunch of people on and they like one product, you can get them to use the others. There was a lot of talk around, "How do we build this app to do everything?" 

I personally thought it was very buzzwordy. Everyone talks about building a super app, but the plans to actually do it—who knows? I wasn't in on any particularly unique plan they had to get there, but I think they were focused pretty heavily on customer acquisition, like every other tech company.

As part of that, there was a desire to build out features to improve the user experience. One of the biggest wins was the get paid early feature, which let people get their paycheck a few days earlier than if their employer paid directly. Customers loved that and it was really impactful in people’s lives. There was also a project around showing people their credit scores, which was basically a way to compete with larger banks and show people their credit scores in the app, the same way that if you go to Chase or any of these large banks, you can normally see a credit score tracker in there. 

There is increased desire to build that full picture view of your finances into the app, because if people are spending money through Chime, they’re going to want to see what their credit score is going to be. 

If you’re using the Chime credit builder—which promises to basically help you build your credit score—you probably want to be able to actually check your credit score. There's a lot of work around some partnerships on that front. Experian had this novel product called Experian Boost, which Chime users got access to. 

Basically, they were trying to use alternate credit score data to impact the overall credit history of people. That's a big issue, and there's a lot of other fintechs in the space working on that problem. The idea is basically that today, your credit score is only really affected by your credit card payments and maybe a mortgage or a car payment. It would be really helpful for consumers if you could also get credit for paying other types of bills on time, like your utility bills or phone bills. 

There was also chatter about building a lending program, which I think became involved with the lending and banking charter question we talked about before, where normally banks make money by taking deposits, lending them, and making money on the interest and on overdraft fees and things like that.

Chime did not make money off those things, just the interchange, but I think there was a desire to get a piece of that pie. Who wouldn’t? If you already have tons and tons of users, it's not hard to be like, "Hey, do you want a little mini loan?" 

I believe the loan program was more focused on small loan amounts, like a few hundred bucks and under. And I think Chime’s idea was better than average for these kinds of small loans—because we had a pretty good window into our users’ financial health, so it could be tailored to a low risk default rate. Plus, users really wanted this feature.

To get access to the loans, you would have had to have set up direct deposit with Chime. And for Chime, it would be a lower risk loan than average because the person who's taking a loan out is already depositing money into their account every single month. Unless you were to switch jobs or lose your job, they would basically always know the money was going to come in.

I'm not sure that it ever really fully launched because market conditions changed.