What was Chime's perspective on the significance of having physical locations, such as Walgreens, for deposits as of late 2021?

That was probably in response to some marketing competition and the fact that a lot of people who use Chime are doing cash-involved banking. 

A lot of Chime customers are lower-income, maybe they're earning tips and they're getting a lot of cash. For them, it was problematic to not have a place to be able to deposit cash easily—normally, they’d have a brick-and-mortar bank to do that. And a lot of folks might not have a great smartphone where they can do easily mobile check deposit—stuff like that.

I believe Chime actually did end up building a mobile check deposit solution, so they made it easier to do that. But I think in general, they thought that they needed to have some sort of physical presence because their customers really wanted to be able to deposit their cash. That's why did these partnerships with Walgreens and a couple of other entities, to basically let them use the ATMs there to deposit cash at those locations.

Those two use cases kind of went hand-in-hand. It's interesting because a whole other category of companies has sort of developed around enabling fintechs to have access to these ATM networks.

Fintechs will say stuff like, "We have 55,000 national ATMs", but really they all have the same access to the same ATMs—it’s one or two networks. 

It’s interesting because Chime’s founder, Chris Britt, came from a company called Green Dot, which was basically a leader in prepaid cards and ATM-type solutions. He was very familiar with the space, which is where I think he probably got this great idea to insert Chime in here.

But they built out some key features to make it easier. For example, in the app, there's a feature, like a map, to find the ATM closest to you. And I think there were issues at one point where it turned out our ATM network was not really in places where most users were. So it wasn't super helpful if you have to find an ATM and it's five miles away. That's not convenient if there's not an ATM in your neighborhood you can use with your primary bank. There’s desire there to get better coverage where their users were located, and so that's partially why they probably chose which network they chose. Gotta hand it to the research team, what a good insight. You sometimes don’t know until you test and iterate.