All right. We are going to get started. Up next, we have Chime and CEO Chris Britt, who is the Co-Founder and CEO. He co-founded Chime in 2013 and completed a successful public offering earlier this year. It's a very exciting time to be in the fintech space and an exciting time to have you on stage.
Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Chris, I think for those on the webcast, particularly one of the first conference presentations post going public, I think it'd be helpful just to maybe go over an overview of who the company is, the strategy, and then I'm looking forward to asking some follow-ups and going one level deeper.
Sure. Chime is a consumer fintech company. We're actually not a bank, but we've had a lot of success in the U.S. market in developing an alternative to traditional banks, particularly for everyday consumers. We target consumers that make up to about $100,000 a year, which happens to be about 75% of our country. We focus on the needs that matter most to this population segment. That includes things like avoiding fees, getting access to short-term liquidity, building credit, and building savings. We wrap that into a mobile-first experience and have been able to develop a lot of credibility and a brand authenticity around genuinely trying to help people make progress in their financial lives. It's been working really, really well. I'm incredibly proud of the success that we've had. Just to give you a sense, today, Chime, on an unaided brand awareness, if you ask consumers in America what brands come to mind when you think of online banking, today, Chime only trails JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America. Great progress. I think the innovation is a combination of having services that really resonate with this population segment, but also doing it in a mobile-first way that a technology company would. We own and operate the vast majority of our tech stack, including all of our processing, which we think is quite a bit differentiated. By operating in that low-cost structure, we're able to deliver better value and essentially free banking services to this huge population that has historically been subject to enormous amounts of fees.
Sure. Maybe let's talk about a competitive advantage. I think Jamie Dimon said in a recent letter that they can't serve the majority of their consumer checking accounts profitably. Can you talk about the structural advantages that Chime has and what allows you to do what some of the largest banks in the country have been unable to?
Yeah, for sure. I saw that quote that he had in his shareholder letter, and I kind of wanted to put it in the S1, but I didn't think it was appropriate. JPMorgan was on the deal, so that would have been weird. We did bring that quote up a lot because I think it did a great job of just capturing what the real opportunity is, which is basically like any reasonable business person, if you have a segment of the population that you can generate high profits from and another segment that you can't, you're obviously going to focus on the segment that you can develop profitable relationships with. What Jamie's saying out loud, what others maybe are afraid to say, is that the only way that they can develop profitable relationships with this segment is by relying heavily on fees. We believe there truly is a generational shift that's happening right now in banking. I'd say respectfully, sometimes some of the investor class people who aren't subject to the fees and aren't dealing with the friction that an everyday consumer that maybe makes $40,000, $50,000 a year faces day to day, and I think maybe it's harder to see. We're changing the way that people are accessing basic core banking services and doing it in a modern, mobile way. I mentioned the fact that we are not a bank. We're actually a technology company. We are able to leverage two key bank partners, The Bancorp Bank and Stride Bank, who are our primary bank partners, who actually hold all the deposits of the consumers. We truly do operate as the technology company and the consumer brand and the interface that sort of runs all aspects of the transaction account for our member. By doing that, by letting the banks hold the deposits and operating the tech stack in-house, as opposed to operating what has historically been a traditional bank's sort of a patchwork of different service providers, maybe one card processing system for your credit card, another core for your deposit services, another platform for check deposits, another one for risk management. We operate that all through a single platform called Chime Core. It is a real competitive advantage for us because we have all of the cost structure savings of being able to operate this in-house. In fact, we used to rely on a third party. We know that when we complete our conversion over to Chime Core by the end of this year, the savings that we've been able to achieve will equate to something like 60%. That gives us a great cost advantage, but it also gives us flexibility to be able to innovate and launch new products without having to rely on third parties. I'd say the combination of advantages are, of course, the cost structure, but probably more important than that is the member obsession we have on this population segment because for us, they're incredibly desirable because we're able to actually help them in their lives, and we can do it really profitably because of the way that we go to market.
Let's talk about that customer, the target customer, a little bit. Obviously, there's a lot of money in the high net worth population that a lot of the large banks focus on. For the everyday American making less than $100,000 a year, I think there's often a misperception. I think we talked about this earlier today, that you cater to unbanked or underserved individuals. How would you describe your typical member? How large is the market? How do you generate revenue from this customer without charging excessive fees?
I'd like to remove that vernacular from the description of what Chime does. I want to be really clear. Chime does not serve the unbanked. We don't serve the underserved. We serve people who are unhappily banked at traditional banks. That's where all of our customers come from. It's typically someone that has a frustrated relationship with a traditional big money center incumbent bank that isn't delivering against the needs that they have. I sort of outlined what some of those key areas of needs happen to be. I just think it's kind of an entirely different orientation to actually serving this population. It's regular everyday people. It's nurses. It's firefighters. I remember on the roadshow, one of the first meetings we had, literally the first meeting on the roadshow, the person at the front desk checking us in, we said we were from the Chime team, and they slid up and they said, "I bank with Chime too." He showed his card. It was awesome.
That is awesome.
It was a great way to sort of kick off the meeting. This is regular everyday people. I think by being able to focus on the needs that they have, we're able to develop a brand that's really resonated with the population. Again, my message is not that the banks are evil and they're trying to hurt this population segment. They just don't focus on them because they can't develop profitable relationships because of their physical orientation to customer acquisition, to servicing, and so forth. The mathematics just don't work out. We truly believe we've built a better mousetrap. It's served us well because I think if you really wanted to boil down the essence of why we're winning in this category, it's because of the alignment that we have with our member base.
Right. I guess a quick follow-up on that. Can you speak to the durability of these members? Any anecdotes that you can share around member lifetimes, churn rates, and just how you think about kind of the average life of your customer?
Yeah, I mean, from the earliest days of starting this company, we've been focused on developing primary account relationships, direct recurring relationships, recurring, largely direct deposit relationships. I remember investors would always pooh-pooh that and say, "Man, that is like the hardest relationship to develop. Why don't you start with a wedge product and then you can get to direct deposit later?" I think our focus on developing primary account relationships has really allowed us to set ourselves apart in terms of what we're known for from a sort of brand perspective. When you develop a direct deposit relationship, especially in our case, after the first year, we see 90% retention rates among our primary account members. We've only been around for 13 years and really active with a product that's even remotely in its current form for maybe nine years at this point in time. I can't tell you for sure how long these relationships last, but I think typical research shows that it's something like 15 - 20 years is the average life of a checking account. We certainly see that our early cohorts continue to stick with us. I think one of the things that we shared in the S1 is that these cohorts not only stick with us, but the relationships actually expand over time. As people change jobs or get raises or have multiple jobs, we're able to capture more of their direct deposit over time and actually expand their retention on a net dollar basis of over 100%.
That's great. I think it's so important you mentioned talking about focusing on the direct deposit relationships first. One thing I repeated numerous times during the roadshow was they really started with the hard part first and they got it right. That kind of gives them the ability and the right to expand to other areas of the business and new activities. How do you feel about the durability of the growth in direct deposit customers? I want to talk about some of the strategy of widening the funnel now.
Yeah, I mean, that is the opportunity. I think more than any company out there, I think we've shown the most success and dedication to that. In fact, we just finished a survey that we run regularly, which canvasses the marketplace outside of Chime specifically. We commissioned a third-party survey of tens of thousands of people who make up to $100,000. We question whether or not we screen for people who have converted a primary account or a direct deposit relationship in the past year. Chime has earned the spot as the number one destination among people who switch their bank account and their direct deposit relationship in that up to $100,000 segment. We think that we are winning in this area. I think when you look at our product structure and the way we're evolving our product structure and our features, you're seeing a commitment to making it clear that when you bank through Chime and use it as a primary account, you're going to unlock a whole host of benefits. That's what a lot of our new product efforts are about.
Great. Maybe pivoting to some of the recent strategy shifts around widening the funnel of the incoming customer base, I think one of the phrases you and the team used a lot with us was you kind of ask customers to get married on the first date. Historically, you're really going after that direct deposit relationship. I think you've been pretty clear year to date about the strategy of widening the funnel, releasing more products for non-direct deposit customers. Can you talk a little bit about this strategy? How's it playing out so far? Where else could we see Chime kind of broaden out the aperture of customer acquisition?
Yeah, I think this is a fairly obvious approach that I would argue we probably should have pursued even earlier. The reality is when you look at the top of the funnel and you see people coming through, we looked ourselves in the mirror and realized that there's a lot of people that we essentially pay a lot of these folks to enter at the top of the funnel through a paid referral or paid media and so forth. They don't even fund the account. They look at it and they're not ready to do direct deposit on the first day, so they kind of just go dormant. It just felt like a waste to us. I think we still have some work to figure out this funnel of people who sign up, maybe fund and engage in a lightweight way and successfully convert them into direct deposit. Maybe just to take a step back, our focus is always when you come in, we display and we scream from the rooftops. The best way to get the most value from Chime is to get direct deposit, and we show all these features that unlock when you do it. It just feels obvious to us that we have to give people an option. It shouldn't be the default, but there should be an option of, you know, if you're not quite ready to do that right out of the gate, you should be able to really easily fund your account. You should be able to plug in your debit card, hit Apple Pay, fund it instantly so that you have a chance to use the product. I think you should expect to continue to see us try out different approaches to give people, you could think of almost like a trial experience. It's natural for us. You can't just hit everyone over the head with a two by four and hope they're going to set up for direct deposit. We're pretty good at that. We want to give people the chance to try before they buy. We're going to continue to innovate on that area and build a bigger pond of fish in and get more people over time to get to direct deposit because not everyone is just going to do it right out of the gate.
Yeah. I guess the understandable focus on direct deposit really shows up in some of the financials. You cite 7x-8x LTV to CAC in your business. That's despite having those customers that come in and never fund the account, never use it. Can you say more about what drives the strong unit economics? How do you build up to that? How do you think about kind of marketing efficiencies over time?
Yeah. Look, the great unit economics come in large part from an acquisition funnel that in large part relies on referrals from our existing member referrals and organic and word of mouth represents about 50% at the top of the funnel of new enrollees into the account. The ability to monetize the relationships because of the depth of the relationship. We announced last quarter that we grew our ARPAM or our average revenue per active member by 12% year -over -year to about $245, which is, I think, pretty high in our category. Importantly, the success we have in driving product attached leads to even higher levels of ARPAM. If you look at the members, which is now over 10% of our members that attach six or more products, that ARPAM is close to $500. We feel really good about the LTV to CAC that you cited of sort of seven-ish quarter payback on CACs. We've actually seen that come down a bit in recent quarters, closer to the five to six zone. We feel really good about the success that we're having in putting dollars to work in a high ROI way to develop relationships that span for many, many years. I think if you were really to boil down the differentiation of Chime relative to other companies, it's that success in developing these long-term primary account relationships. Our low-cost approach to all of our products is always in service to developing the primary account relationships. We're happy to sacrifice short-term revenue if it means long-term recurring payments driven revenue.
That makes sense. Just for clarification, the five to six, is that payback or is that LTV to CAC?
I'm sorry, that was payback.
Payback.
Yeah, sorry.
That's a good projection.
Yeah, my bad.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm sorry. I thought you were talking about acquisition efficiency.
Yeah, great, great, great. OK, let's go back to Chime Core, your proprietary payment processing application and ledger. This is pretty differentiated. There's a very small number of people who have built this out internally. Most people are leveraging a Marketo or a Galileo or some other platform in order to do most of the card issuance. Can you talk about what did it take to get here? Because that's a big undertaking. Where are you in that transition and how do you frame the benefit once that's fully complete?
Right. It took a few years for us to get here for sure. This was not an insignificant task. I'm excited that we are near the end of our journey. There will still be investments to KTLO the platform, but the bulk of our work is right in the red zone. We've announced to the street that it was our intention to have all elements of our conversion over to the Chime Core as the system of record and processing platform for all of our cards by the end of this year. From an internal process perspective, we're actually ahead of schedule on that front. I mentioned earlier that we think this in total, we've already realized some of this benefit, a good amount of it, but in total, we think it's about a 60% cost save. More important than that is just being able to have full control of our destiny and not having to, even when you have some amount of market influence and ability to get third parties to perform in a development for innovation, we like being able to control the priorities on our side. Importantly, when you create new innovations, to be able to have those innovations be proprietary. Naturally, when processing systems launch a feature enhancement and so forth, the first thing they do is to sell it to other potential competitors. We think this is going to only accelerate the velocity of innovation that you've seen from us over the past few quarters with the launch of Chime Plus, Chime Card yesterday, and the soon-to-be completed conversion to Chime Core.
Do you see longer term? Are there other areas of benefit from some of the infrastructure? I know you leverage a number of banking partners in the background. Do you see these as potential future opportunities to drive more efficiencies?
You're saying the bank partnerships?
With the bank partnerships or any other area like third-party vendors.
I think that there's a real strategic advantage of having that processing tech stack in-house and the centralization of data in an AI-powered world, like having to rely on third parties and different data pools to get the data and to iterate on data for better intelligence and to design AI-powered systems. We think this is a real competitive advantage, especially relative to incumbents who may have three or four different platforms that they have to rely on that maybe are associated with an individual consumer. We're always, as we, we're in a payments business, and the payments business certainly rewards scale. I think you see that in the business and our margins, and the margins get better as more transactions run through the system for sure.
Yeah, makes sense. OK, let's pivot to Chime Card. This was a big announcement yesterday. Why don't you talk a little bit about what's changing to the, what you just kind of referred to as the credit builder card, and how does the journey from new consumers coming into Chime change post this announcement?
Yeah, we're incredibly excited about creating a more rewarding approach to banking with this Chime Card product that we launched yesterday. Yes, Chime Card is a sort of latest incarnation of our credit builder card. We're just calling this Chime Card, but it still gets you the credit building feature that you get from a secured card. It allows consumers to sign up for a Chime account and decide to bank with us to use this secured card where you get a line of credit that is equivalent to the amount of money that you set aside in advance. If you have $1,000, you can set that aside, and that gives you a line of credit of up to $1,000. It's a safe way to spend and build credit because you only spend what you have available to put aside in this secured account. That allows our members to continue to build credit just from their everyday transactions. It's really been a hit product for us. What I'm excited about is this new version of the product just sort of levels it up a bit. It's a more premium edition plastic. We also have a titanium metal card option that people can sign up for for an additional fee, a one-time fee. The way it works is if you sign up for a Chime account and you're getting direct deposit and you have one of these new Chime Card secured cards, you can get 1.5% cashback on everyday transactions in a rotating set of categories. Every month we rotate to categories that are generally like primary, a lot of non-discretionary spend items. It could be like groceries or fuel or restaurants, some online transactions. We're pretty excited about this being just another reason why you'd want to sign up, get direct deposit, activate our Chime Plus level of service because you're doing direct deposit, and that unlocks the 1.5% cashback. I think you're going to continue to see from us more and more reasons, more bundling of products and services that reward our members who elect to use us as their primary account. We also want to make sure that we're giving differentiation and unlock even more premium features and rewards for people that give us more of their direct deposit and more of their spend. This is an exciting step in that direction.
Great.
I'll just say, like you asked about how it will work in the journey. Our members will still 100% be able to get a debit card. That's going to continue to be a big part of our product offering. This will sort of be like a featured service because it has enhanced benefits. We're hopeful that it drives even greater attach of the credit product. That actually helps a bit with our spend mix, driving even more volume through credit as opposed to debit.
Yeah, no, it makes perfect sense. OK, and then I wanted to switch to MyPay. I think when we think about the traditional banking business model, you kind of think of taking deposits and making loans. The core of your business is a lot of the money has been made on the deposit side and monetizing the spending side. I think MyPay is one of the first forays into more of a lending relationship and probably been one of the most, I would imagine, the most successful product launch in the company's history. Really significant penetration out of the gate starting last year. You've also seen improving unit economics since the launch. Maybe you can talk a little bit about the adoption of that product that you've seen, the performance and loss rates that you've seen to date, and just how you think about the trajectory that we were on both in terms of adoption and loss rates over the next couple of quarters.
Yeah, we're really pleased with the rollout of this product. It's now close to 30% attach rate, and a top reason at the top of the funnel why people sign up for Chime. Another reason, you know, people often ask, like, what is the thing that people sign up with Chime for? It isn't a single thing. It's a package of services that address those categories of needs. This is the latest product in the short-term liquidity area. We're seeing really nice levels of attach. We're seeing really good performance. It's now already over a $300 million revenue run rate business for us. What's great is that we're able to have such an exciting business that's kind of gone from 0 - 60 so quickly, but also a product at the same time that is far and away the best value in the category of essentially earned wage access products. When you sign up for our MyPay product, there's a free option where you can get up to $500 of your paycheck on demand. If you wait 24 hours, it's free. If you want it instantly, it's a $2 fee. That's the best lowest cost in the market. On the performance side, we're very pleased. We announced that we had been at about a 1.6% loss rate and moved it to 1.4% in the last quarter. We've also signaled that you should expect to see that to continue to move in that same direction, closer to 1% over time. Really good performance, and it's only going to get better as we get a little bit more mature in the rollout of this credit product. I also just want to reiterate, this is not a typical consumer lending product that you might see at traditional lenders in that it's extremely short duration. These short-term credit extensions get paid back in essentially a week and a half. We have full control of the dial on if we ever needed to change course for some reason. We feel really good about this as being a core value prop and once again taking a lead in the category and setting direction for consumer-friendly products for a population segment that often is taken advantage of.
Yeah, it makes sense. I want to bring it back to an earlier part of the conversation around broadening the funnel. I know MyPay Day One, allowing kind of new users to the platform to get a taste of that experience. What's your thought process there? Where are you in that process? Any kind of early signs of adoption there?
It's very early. I don't know if it's going to work. We're trying it out. We're going to continue to test on different ways to get people through to become direct deposit account holders. For those of you that don't know, we are experimenting on a very limited basis to offer people who have not yet signed up for direct deposit that we think, OK, for whatever reason, we're not being effective in converting them. We are testing the opportunity to give them a smaller level of MyPay, much less than the $500 for a higher price, not so much to create a new standalone money-making business, but to see if we can unlock a new channel to get people to try it out, see that it's a nice service, and see that if they actually did their direct deposit, they get the same product, the same construct of the product, but with just a better version of it, with higher limits and lower prices.
Yeah, no, it makes sense. Looking forward to hearing more about it.
Yeah, we hope it works. Again, we're only a month or two into the test.
Great. OK, Instant Loans, I think, was another new product that launched this year. In my experience, this has gotten a little bit less attention than some of the other new products. Maybe frame out the value proposition of that product to your members and talk about where you are in the rollout process and anything that you're seeing.
We're really excited about this product. Our members love this product. I think the Net Promoter Score on it is something like 80. For those of you that aren't aware of it, it's a basic installment loan product. It's just really easy to sign up for and use. People are pre-qualified for it. You can select a three-month or six-month payback option, paying back on a monthly basis. It's a low price. We're trying it out on a much smaller subset of our members than we've offered MyPay to. I think like single-digit % of our member base. I think we're just building our underwriting muscle in our most valuable customers that we have the longest relationship with, and we feel like we have ability to underwrite them based on this cash flow that's coming into the account. I think it's going to be, as we see, repeat users of the service. We're seeing it really perform very, very well. We expect it to continue to be an exciting part of our portfolio. We will likely evolve it so that you could imagine looking in your transaction history and seeing a larger transaction, Chime would say, hey, do you want to finance that over three months or six months? We'll give you the money back for the transaction you just made. I think there's cool ways to use this as a relationship product because, again, at the end of the day, we look at all of these products in service of driving and retaining long-term direct deposit relationships. Over time, as we think about, for example, potentially offering an unsecured credit card for a subset of our members, again, who have direct deposit, we think that our experience with this product will help to inform a rollout of that type of product down the line as well.
Got it. OK, one kind of loosely financial-oriented question. Matt's in the audience, so he's leaving you hanging up here. You've talked about a lot of new products, both lending and non-lending. How do you think about the resultant trajectory of ARPAM over time?
I mentioned 12% year -over -year. I didn't know all your questions, so maybe I already answered this question to some extent. Our most engaged members are doing double that of ARPAM. What's great about the ARPAM that we're generating from these more highly engaged members, it's not like we're just getting more ARPAM by driving up more fees. We're actually getting more ARPAM because as they attach more products, they actually do even more of their spending with us. It is very much aligned with the consumer. There is no question. There is a ton of runway for us on the ARPAM side. I think investors should think of that as an important dial that we can turn to drive even more profitable relationships with our members, doing it in a very member-aligned way. I think we're going to continue to push on this. We've said in our roadshow that this is probably one area that we have not focused a lot of time on. In some ways, I think that's good because our primary focus has been on just member engagement and direct deposits as opposed to trying to eke out every last profit or revenue line that we can. I think that's what probably sets us apart from a big bank in that regard.
Totally.
For the record, we're not against fees, especially in products that require fees to make the economics work. We think we're uniquely positioned to have the lowest cost products in our category.
Yeah, no, very clear. OK, we got a couple of minutes left. I want to squeeze two last ones in. First, on Chime Enterprise, if I remember, this is one of the products during the IPO you were saying you were most excited about. You've announced a couple of partnerships since earnings. Could you give us an update on that strategy? How are you thinking about the launch of new employer partners? How do you think about the channel as a feeder to net adds and direct depositors over time?
We're really excited about this channel. We launched to employers, Ubiquiti, which is a call center company, and a company called Etech. Early results have been awesome. We're seeing great adoption rates. We're actually seeing that a lot of the workers at these employers actually have Chime accounts.
Oh, wow.
Now their Chime accounts just got better, because with the enterprise version of MyPay, you get 100% of your paycheck every day on demand for free. There is a real benefit to the employer because they've got a more valuable offering to the employee. We've also seen resurrection among members who had Chime accounts that work at these companies that now are signing up for a Chime account, re-engaging with us. The biggest segment is people who don't have Chime accounts and they're coming to us. We're really excited. We look at these as real evergreen channels because if you think about the turnover in a lot of these employees, like they might go through, like a retailer might go through two turns of employees over the course of a year. We also announced a relationship with Workday. Now if you're a Workday employer, it's really easy to sign up for Chime services for our core account, for our paycheck on demand, our earned wage access product. We already have that direct integration into the time and attendance and payroll system, so it's really easy for new folks to sign up. We're excited to hopefully have some referenceable accounts now that we're in the wild, live with the product. That should lead to additional growth. We're trying to temper expectations because these are enterprise deals. They take a long time to implement, and even when you implement it, it takes a little bit of time to get into the core operating system of how the HR and benefits teams work at these companies. It's a big focus of ours. Probably not much of an impact this year, but we're hopeful that next year this becomes an increasingly important channel for us.
That's great. All right, in the last couple of minutes here, or seconds, I guess, it is a tech conference. I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about artificial intelligence. How is Chime using artificial intelligence today? How do you think about artificial intelligence, particularly from a customer-facing perspective longer term?
We are embedding artificial intelligence into every aspect of our business. We have essentially every employee using artificial intelligence. It's now the expectation of how we do our work. I think it's helping us to evolve the way work gets done inside of the company. Our product and edge teams are already becoming smaller teams, more self-sufficient because they can get more done with fewer people, which can lead to greater output. There is no question that this is going to lead to additional opportunity for us on the OpEx side. We already see artificial intelligence having a huge impact on our customer support service. It's like 72% of interactions are now handled by artificial intelligence, including voice artificial intelligence. It works very well. Not only is it lower cost, but it's actually higher satisfaction scores. Maybe just I'll leave you with the parting point on this is that's all well and good, and we're going to use it for more and more efficiency. The real opportunity is harnessing this new technology to create better consumer experiences. You could imagine us helping our members, essentially have an advisor in your pocket that gives you advice on answers to questions and gives you direction on where to spend, where not to spend, how you're trending versus people in a similar demo, questions about what else they can do outside of our credit-building services to build their credit scores and help them think about long-term financial success. We aim to play a role in that regard. We think given this deep relationship we have and this unique data set that we have, that we should be able to do that better than anyone.
Great. I think with that, we're out of time. Thanks so much for taking the time today. Really appreciate your support of the conference. Congratulations on the successful IPO. We're looking forward to seeing you next year.
Thanks, Will.