Chime to buy longtime partner Stride Bank for $590 million

• Key insights: Chime is acquiring Enid, Oklahoma-based Stride Bank for $590 million in cash. 
• What’s at stake: Owning its own bank will allow Chime to build products faster, shed partner banking fees and more efficiently expand its lending business. 
• Forward look: The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027 and is subject to approvals from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve.

Chime is finally going to be a bank. It’s a full-circle moment for the fintech, which from day one has set out to challenge the legacy, fee-based banking model. 

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The neobank said Tuesday that it’s acquiring Enid, Oklahoma-based Stride Bank for $590 million in cash. Stride has provided Chime with banking services for more than seven years. If the deal is approved, Stride will become Chime Bank, a wholly owned subsidiary of Chime, led by Brud Baker, who currently is Stride Bank’s chairman and CEO.

“The opportunity for us to actually own a charter was really not a matter of if, it was just when,” Chime CEO Chris Britt told American Banker after the deal was announced. “Our ambition is to be the largest provider of primary bank accounts in America. So naturally, at some point, it would make sense to [own a charter], and we feel like now is the when.” 

Owning its own bank will allow Chime to build products faster, shed partner banking fees and reduce its funding costs. And directly connecting Chime Core, the neobank’s proprietary technology core, with Stride’s banking infrastructure will help unify data.

That’s important in an era where artificial intelligence is accelerating the rate at which technology companies can build and ship products, Britt said.

“You can use this technology to build things faster than ever and innovate, but at the end of the day, in a highly regulated category like ours, when you have multiple handoffs and different data sets on different parties and so forth, it just doesn’t allow for the most streamlined set of operations,” Britt said. 

The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027, and is subject to approvals from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve. Following those approvals, Chime expects to consolidate its banking activities at Stride while keeping its assets below $10 billion for the foreseeable future. Banks above $10 billion of assets are subject to debit interchange caps. 

Chime also said in a press release that it decided to buy a bank rather than apply for a de novo bank charter because it “provides a faster and more proven path to full-stack ownership.”

Chime raised its full-year guidance with the announcement, and now expects revenue in the third quarter to hit $705 million, representing a year-over-year growth rate of about 30%. For the full year, Chime expects revenue between $2.76 billion and $2.77 billion, or a year-over-year increase of 26%-27%. 

Keefe Bruyette & Woods analyst Sanjay Sakhrani called the acquisition an “efficient way to drive vertical integration, creating expense and funding upside.” Shares of Chime were up as much as 11% in after-hours trading in New York.