Everett, Chris, hello. Thank you for joining us. Yes. See you coordinated your outfits today. Great work.
Chris, let's start with you. Chime has been moving towards wealthier customers a bit, but your core customer was historically making what, $50,000-$75,000 a year out of middle class. Can you give us a consumer gut check on that set right now? What you're seeing in account balances and spending?
Yeah, for sure. And thanks for having me. We really have a privileged position to be able to see the health of the consumer. We have about, in Q4 we announced 9.5 million monthly actives. The majority of them use Chime as their primary everyday bank account. So we offer bank accounts FDIC insured in partnership with some community banks that we partner with.
Chime is itself not a bank.
We're not a bank. Yeah. We're a fintech, a technology company that sort of sits above that. Creates the experience and designs the products and services in partnership with our banks. But we've been really effective in getting people to use Chime as their primary bank account. So, our average customer does over 50 transactions per month with their Chime card, either their debit or Chime credit card, secured credit card. And we reported in Q4 again that sort of similar to what the banks reported just in the last couple days here, the consumer in America is resilient. We're seeing a nice mix of both non-discretionary and discretionary spend that's been up. We've seen savings account balances that are also up year-over-year. So overall, despite the macro volatility and geopolitical uncertainty, we see a very healthy consumer. We haven't seen any uptick in unemployment claims or anything because you would see that come in unemployment check. I mean, we saw it during COVID. We saw, you know, when people fall into tough times, they tend to send, you know, any support that they get from the government to their primary account, which for the majority of our customers is Chime. So, nothing on the consumer is strong still today.
Overdraft protection, early wage access, those kinds of things.
Yeah. You know, it's been tax refund season, so that's always the best time of the year for us in terms of deposit volume coming into the accounts. And, yeah, people continue to use our early wage access, which allows our members to get access to their paycheck really on demand at any point in time over the course of the pay cycle. They can get it for free if they wait 24 hours or for a small fee, they can get it instantly. And it's really working. Our brand is becoming extremely well-known. In fact, I was just telling you as I was walking in here, someone at the front desk was like, 'You're actually the Chime guy.' And he knew about us and he signed up for an account as I walked by.
Some for World Economy is business development. Great. Can you see how they're spending their tax refunds?
Yeah, for sure. You know the tax refunds, like I said, a mix of discretionary and non-discretionary spend, still a healthy consumer spend activity. I'd say probably the biggest notable and probably not surprising stat that I could share is that from February to March we saw spending on fuel up double digit percentage month over month. So obviously the consumer is feeling a little bit of pressure in that area but overall the consumer is still strong and generally remains close to full employment here.
Everett, Kickstarter obviously a platform where people fund creative endeavors that is the definition of a discretionary purchase. How resilient is that sort of creative funding community right now?
Yeah, I mean it's been really incredible. In 2025 we had our best year of all time by far. Record-breaking numbers revenue-wise, GMV-wise, users-wise. And so, we're seeing this incredible uptick. And I think one of my hypotheses is about the economy in general. You know, you have massive layoffs. People are finding alternative ways to go into entrepreneurship. The creator economy is exploding. And so, we're seeing that, but also people are realizing that Kickstarter is more than just a crowdfunding platform. Many people use this for pre-order. Many entrepreneurs are using this to build audiences. And you know, Kickstarter isn't the place people are raising $10,000, $15,000. People are raising $20, $30, $40 million on our platform selling products across different categories. And so I think it's been a place where a lot of people are now saying like, 'Hey, there's millions of people using this app and this website every day. I want to tap into that.' And also this is an age of independence just due to the economy and people being forced into being a creator in entrepreneurship or people just want to be independent now.
How much of this is there's some embedded cultural backlash to AI that has people streaming towards, you know, Etsy has leaned into this in some way. There is some sense of like the last true thing that a human being is doing. We want to gravitate towards that. Have you leaned into that marketing? Is that something that your creators are counting on?
Yeah, it's interesting because you know we have such a big platform that we have people on both sides right? We have people who are like 'yay AI', you know, some of our biggest growth were with like AI-enabled tech products and physical products. But then on the other side with creatives, you know, we have so many filmmakers, writers, filmmakers, music that are actually pretty anti-AI. And so, you know, we are focused on making sure that we're serving both. You know, we're one of the first major tech companies to come out with our own like pretty concrete AI policy to protect creative people. People have to say that they're actually using AI in their projects or their products. And if they're not, they're taken off the site. And so, we're doing our best to protect creatives, but at the same time, we're trying to empower people who are using AI tools to be able to be successful on the platform.
Have you, how do you police that? You found any bad actors, kicked them off the platform?
Yeah, I mean we have different software, external and internal built software to be able to track and see those things, but it's not something that's foolproof, right? Like you can't catch everything, but I think we catch a great deal. And then also our community is on it. Like when they see something AI that has not been flagged, they will absolutely let us know on social media, in our DMs, everywhere.
So you're crowdfunding the projects and some of the enforcement user generated. Yeah. Chris, we had the CEO of Fifth Third, Tim Spence, the big super regional banks here the other day talking about financial deregulation and he said from the banking perspective, he said be careful what you wish for that banks may be getting quite a bit of what they want on capital relief and other things, mergers, but that deregulation is very good for fintechs and crypto too. Should the banks be afraid of you?
Well, for the last two quarters, JD Power reported that Chime opened up more bank accounts than any institution in America. Almost second only to... so yes. So I would say maybe yes. Not to be cocky, we like to think that we're adding a healthy dose of competition in an industry that is increasingly consolidated among a very small number of banks that sort of rule the market if you will. So you know I'm really proud of the innovation that we've created and there's no question it's a sort of lighter touch regulatory environment but you know one of the core values that we have as a company is to respect the rules. We operate in a highly regulated space. This isn't, you know, you can't just vibe code a bank account. You actually have to be integrated with banks and the regulatory regime and compliance and all these sorts of things. So we take all that very seriously. We don't, you know, skirt the rules. And, I like to think, you know, I'm confident in saying that we are a good actor and we'll certainly focus on, you know, designing great consumer products that are always compliant.
But a lot of the fintechs of your generation launched kind of staunchly anti-bank. And then a lot of them ended up getting a bank charter or buying a bank. And there was a point where they wanted to do things that would require them particularly to lend and have a balance sheet. And in fact, we had PayPal CEO on this stage last year asked him whether they'd ever become a bank. He said that's not the plan and then they went and did it. So just to throw down a marker, what plans, you know, is there ever a point where Chime can't continue to be reliant on these community bank partners that operate mostly in the background and actually goes whole hog itself?
I mean, the bank partnership model has worked extremely well for us over the years. We've created a great set of consumer products, and our bank partners have really benefited from the deposits that we bring to them that they otherwise wouldn't be able to acquire at the scale that we bring to them. Every year, we always re-evaluate the opportunity to potentially pursue a bank charter. Obviously, the market is more open, more receptive to that these days. So, we don't have any announcement on that front, but it's something that we continue to look at. And I won't put a line in the sand, you know, definitively on one side or the other. But it's always an option for us.
Treasury is clearly certainly more so than ever right now. They want more banks. They want de novo charters. If you were to, if I can just like trap you a little bit, if you were to think about that, is acquiring a bank the right way to go? A full national charter? We've seen a lot of these sort of slim down state licenses in Utah and some other places. Like what product would you be looking to offer that you don't today that a license might be helpful for?
Well, honestly, that's part of the calculation for why we haven't pursued a bank charter before because we didn't feel like there was any product that we wanted to do that we weren't able to do because of our non-bank status. Look, we are getting a little bit more into credit extension and lending. It's a sort of different type. It's very short-term in nature with, you know, extremely manageable loss rates. We announced last quarter our MyPay earned wage access product got to a 1% loss rate which is I think is among industry leading and the lowest cost product in the market. So, you know, if we were to ever pursue a bank charter, either a de novo or an acquisition, you know, it would probably be mostly driven by the fact that we are becoming a larger player in credit extension and lending and that would help us with cost of capital and, you know, the ability to roll out products at an even faster clip. But again, it's not something that, you know, we're about to announce, okay, but something that we are always evaluating.
Got it. Everett, Kickstarter launched in 2009.
