Chime’s Next Test After Its IPO: Buying the Bank Behind It.

Chime Financial priced its Chime IPO at $27 a share on the Nasdaq in June 2025. Sixteen months later, it has agreed to buy the bank that holds its customers’ deposits. The deal, announced in September, would turn Chime from a technology company renting a bank charter into one that owns it outright.

Under the agreement, Chime will pay $590 million in cash for Stride Bank, N.A. Stride is a nationally chartered lender in Enid, Oklahoma. It has been Chime’s deposit-holding partner for more than seven years. The price works out to roughly 1.5 times Stride’s tangible book value. The deal still needs approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve. Chime’s own announcement puts the expected close in the first half of 2027. Once it closes, Chime will become a bank holding company for the first time, under direct Federal Reserve supervision.

Why own the bank instead of renting one

Chime’s deposits already sit at Stride and at a second partner, The Bancorp Bank. This is the sponsor-bank model most American neobanks use. The fintech builds the app and the customer relationship. A separately regulated bank holds the money and the charter. That arrangement carries its own risk. It became hard to ignore after the collapse of the banking-as-a-service middleman Synapse in 2024, which left some fintech customers locked out of their own deposits for months. Owning the bank removes a layer that can fail independently of Chime itself.

Chime frames the deal mainly as a cost play rather than a risk play. It expects more than $100 million a year in cost savings, chiefly from no longer paying Stride a partner fee and from a lower cost of funding its lending products. Chime says it plans to keep the combined balance sheet under $10 billion in assets. That is the threshold under the Durbin Amendment above which a bank loses its exemption from federal debit interchange price caps. Interchange is central to how Chime earns money on every card swipe, so staying under that line matters almost as much as the acquisition itself.

A different route to the same goal

Buying an established bank is not the only path fintechs have taken toward owning their own charter. Several have instead applied for an industrial loan company charter, a route that lets a commercial parent own a bank without becoming a bank holding company itself. Chime chose the opposite. It is acquiring an existing national charter and accepting the Federal Reserve oversight that an ILC structure is built to avoid.

It is one more sign of how differently fintechs are now answering the same question. Non-bank platforms are pushing further into owning the banking infrastructure behind their products, rather than renting it, a shift Fintechly has tracked across how fintech is reshaping the future of banking.

The scorecard since the IPO

Chime’s Nasdaq debut itself was a strong one. Priced above its expected range at $27, the stock opened at $43 and closed up 37% on its first day of trading in June 2025.

Sixteen months on, that gain has narrowed considerably. CHYM shares closed at $29.67 on 16 October 2026. That is about 10% above the IPO price. It is well below both the debut high and the $11.6 billion fully diluted valuation the IPO itself represented, a figure that was already a steep discount to Chime’s last private funding round.

The underlying business has improved since listing. Chime’s own second-quarter results, reported in August, showed revenue up 27% year over year to $670 million. It was the company’s second consecutive quarter of GAAP net income. Chime raised its full-year guidance on the back of its new Chime Prime membership tier.

Wall Street’s verdict, for now

Analyst sentiment moved quickly after the Stride Bank announcement. Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Wells Fargo, Evercore ISI and several others raised their price targets within a day of the 8 September news. The stock now carries a consensus Buy rating from 21 covering analysts, with an average target near $38, according to ratings tracked by the financial data site Benzinga. The most recent move came on 8 October, when Deutsche Bank upgraded Chime from Hold to Buy.

None of that settles the question the IPO itself could not answer: whether a neobank built on thin transaction margins can carry the cost, and the regulatory weight, of owning a bank outright. That depends on what the Comptroller’s office and the Federal Reserve decide over the coming months. It depends, too, on whether Chime can keep its balance sheet small enough to hold onto the interchange exemption its business still relies on. A fuller picture of who else is active in this part of the market sits on Fintechly’s capital markets sector directory.