Chime cofounder and CEO Chris Britt is planning to take his 13-year-old company public this year.
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Chime, the largest digital bank in America, grew its revenue to $1.7 billion in 2024, an increase of roughly 30% from 2023, according to a person familiar with its finances. The San Francisco company wasn’t profitable for the year, but it lost less than $50 million, the person said. That was a significant narrowing from 2023, when it burned about $200 million. Chime has also reached eight million active customers, up from seven million in the first half of 2024, according to another person familiar with its business. Those positive trends all suggest it is on track with its plans to go public. A Chime spokesperson declined to comment.
Founded in 2012, Chime initially grew popular by offering a free checking account and debit card where consumers could access their paycheck two days before other banks made it available. It has catered largely to younger Americans earning between $35,000 and $65,000 and has built a sticky business by requiring customers to set up direct deposit to get access to a growing list of features, including $200 worth of free overdraft protection, a secured credit card that helps build your credit score and personal loans.
Chime’s continued growth has been driven by heavy spending on advertising and cross-selling its customers on additional products, such as its credit builder card. It spent about $200 million on advertising in 2024, according to market research firm MediaRadar, roughly the same as what it spent in 2023. Last year, Chime also launched MyPay, a new earned wage access service that lets consumers access up to $500 of their pay before payday, and it acquired startup Salt Labs to bring earned wage access products to employers. Chime made Forbes’ Fintech 50 list earlier this month for the seventh consecutive year.
Since Chime doesn’t have a bank charter, it partners with Bancorp Bank and Stride Bank to offer banking products like checking and savings accounts. It makes the vast majority of its revenue on interchange fees–the 1% to 2% charge merchants pay to accept debit and credit cards. As of late last year, Chime had 1,400 employees.
The company is planning to go public in the first half of this year, according to a person familiar with its business, and it filed confidentially for an IPO late last year, according to Bloomberg. Industry insiders expect it will be valued at $10 billion or more when it makes its public debut. Caplight, a secondary market trading and analytics firm, estimates Chime’s valuation at $11 billion, up substantially from a year ago. In Caplight’s estimate, the increase is driven by factors like mutual funds’ valuations of their private Chime stock, secondary market trades of Chime shares and the performance of comparable public companies.
One of Chime’s closest competitors, Block’s Cash App, has seen slowing growth recent months, with its monthly active users growing just 2% in the fourth quarter of 2024 to 57 million, up from 56 million the year prior. That doesn’t mean Chime is poised to see slowing growth soon too, since it has a fraction of the customer base, more room to grow and a different strategy. Historically, Chime has focused more intently on getting customers to sign up for direct deposit than Cash App.
In the broader landscape of primary banking apps, Chime’s market share is still only in the low single digits. Chase, for example, had 58 million active mobile customers at the end of last year.