Good Afternoon Everyone,
Has anyone heard of Chime bank before? Apparently is the main challenger bank in the USA with around a million of customers.
I was a bit surprised when I read about it as I know of Monzo’s intention of expanding in the US market and never realised there were already important players in the market.
Has anyone got more info about them? (i.e. how long have they been around / quality of the bank)
I couldn’t find much online.
How is Monzo supposed to deal with that, and what’s their strategy for the US market?
Also, Chime is not a bank, it’s a bank account running on another bank’s (Bancorp’s) infrastructure. I imagine this will constrain how much they can innovate and what they can offer.
There have been a few others using a similar model in recent years, I think. Ultimately, as @lumisota says, the US is a very big market so I don’t think a small player like this is going to be their biggest issue. Monzo hit 1 million UK users in less than a year in a market that’s ~6x smaller than the US.
Not saying that Chime wouldn’t be attractive to someone in the US given how bad the banking system is over there. But I think Monzo can easily compete with this.
You need to relate that figure ( 1 million customers) to the amount of time they’ve been around before saying it’s small. If they’ve gathered 1 million customers in a relatively small amount of time that can be relevant. That’s why I am making if anyone knows more about them i.e. when they started the business.
This is a good point, though if the article that @Rat_au_van posted is corrected, then they added 1 million accounts in about 5 years.
My thought is more that while it’s easy to think of companies like as Starling being Monzo’s competitors (and of course, technically they are), there is much more to be gained by attracting customers from legacy banks. That’s a different audience altogether.
So Chime has taken 6 years to gain 3m users in a market with 300m. Monzo has taken 4 years to gain 2m users in a market 1/6 the size. I like their chances.
Their SpotMe proposition is interesting. I travel quite a lot so in the US I see a lot of adverts for these completely free payday advances. It’s nothing at all like Wonga and the likes, they let you ‘access’ your paycheck or a portion of it early and it’s automatically taken back on payday without any charges. Optionally, you can leave a tip. It seems there’s a fair few of these services now.
If they really had 1 m customers in January when I opened the thread, and they now have 5 m, then that’s an astonishing growth rate…and yet people dismissed them a irrelevant back then…
Turns out they don’t have 5 million customers, most likely closer to 1.6 million.
I’m not saying Chime isn’t a competitor to Monzo, but I still think Monzo is well placed to take them on in the US. I imagine Chime have used a lot more off-the-shelf components instead of building their own.
The average customer doesn’t know or care about this. They just care whether it works well and delivers the experience that either meets or exceeds their expectations.
You’re an advanced user so will make decisions based on things the normal person wouldn’t even realise existed.
