Chime to buy Stride Bank for $590 million and become a bank holding company

Chime Financial agreed after the close on Tuesday, September 8, to stop renting the national bank behind its accounts and buy it. The consumer-finance company will pay $590 million in cash for Stride Bank, N.A., the Enid, Oklahoma lender that has held Chime member deposits and issued its cards for more than seven years. Upon closing, Stride would be renamed Chime Bank, N.A., and Chime itself would become a bank holding company: a parent the Federal Reserve supervises because it owns a bank.

What Chime gets is the charter it has rented for seven years, and with it the fee, funding, and lending economics of owning a bank. What it gives up is a stated ceiling on assets. After closing, Chime said, it will consolidate banking activity at Stride, manage that balance sheet, and keep assets below $10 billion “for the foreseeable future.”

That line is the deal’s real constraint. Under the Federal Reserve’s Regulation II, the cap on debit-card interchange fees, the swipe fees a card issuer collects from merchants, does not apply to an issuer that, together with its affiliates, has fewer than $10 billion in assets. In the first quarter of 2026, interchange-based fees from debit cards were 41% of Chime’s revenue, the company disclosed in its 10-Q. Credit-card interchange, which that cap does not touch, was another 25%. Chime’s 10-Q already warns that it depends on its bank partners remaining small-issuer exempt and that it cannot guarantee they will. Whether the Fed treats the post-close structure as exempt is a classification, not a deal term, and it has not been determined.

Stride is not a tiny bank. Its call report put total assets at $5.42 billion as of June 30, more than halfway to the line Chime says it will not cross. Chime separately said the deal should be immediately accretive to earnings per share at closing and produce more than $100 million in net synergies from three sources it did not size separately: the sponsor-bank fees it will stop paying, room to expand lending, and a lower cost of funds. Those are the ownership savings. They are not a stand-in for the debit interchange Chime collects under the small-issuer exemption.

Buying the bank it already uses

Chime is not a bank today. Deposits in its accounts are FDIC-insured through Stride or The Bancorp Bank, N.A., and those banks are the legal issuers of its debit and credit cards. The arrangement let Chime build a mobile product for 10.4 million Active Members as of the end of June, without a charter of its own. It also meant Chime paid sponsor-bank fees and did not control funding, lending, or the national charter.

The Tuesday agreement is structured as a merger of a Chime subsidiary into Central Service Corporation, Stride’s parent. Chime put the price at about 1.5 times Stride’s tangible book value, said both boards had approved the deal unanimously, and said CSC’s shareholders had already signed off. It called the purchase a faster path to “full-stack ownership” than applying for a new bank charter from scratch. Chris Britt, Chime’s chief executive and co-founder, said the company’s “member-aligned, technology-driven strategy will remain the same” and that owning Stride’s charter and team would accelerate its aim to be “the largest provider of primary bank accounts in America.” Brud Baker, Stride’s chairman and chief executive, said he expects to keep leading the bank under the Chime name.

Chime said it will fund the $590 million from cash on its balance sheet and does not anticipate raising extra capital. As of June 30 it held $536.0 million in cash and cash equivalents and $527.4 million in marketable securities.

For members, the company said nothing changes in the app, cards, direct deposit, or fees today, and that eligible deposits remain at FDIC-insured banks up to applicable limits. What it did not say is what happens to the two-bank structure at close. Deposits today are held at Stride or Bancorp. Chime’s plan to consolidate banking activity at Stride leaves unanswered whether Bancorp-held accounts move over in 2027, and whether any member’s deposit insurance changes if one of the two partner banks drops out. Chime did not resolve that on Tuesday.

The Fed, the OCC, and SoFi’s wait

None of that happens on Tuesday’s signature. Closing is slated for the first half of 2027, subject to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve Board, plus customary conditions. A company that wants to become a bank holding company generally needs the Fed’s prior approval under Section 3 of the Bank Holding Company Act. The OCC has to bless the combination when the surviving bank is a national bank. Chime’s 8-K flags the obvious open questions: approvals can be delayed or denied, integration can cost more than planned, the synergies may not show up in full, and a fintech that becomes a bank holding company can draw tighter supervision.

SoFi Technologies announced a deal on March 9, 2021, to acquire Golden Pacific Bank. On January 18, 2022, about 10 months later, the Fed approved SoFi as a bank holding company and the OCC conditionally approved the bank combination. The OCC required initial paid-in capital of no less than $750 million, an operating agreement, and a bar on crypto-asset activities without a prior written non-objection. The deal closed on February 2, 2022. Chime has not said what conditions, if any, the OCC will attach this time.

Stride has other fintech clients. It became a card issuer for the Affirm Card in 2025, alongside Evolve Bank & Trust. Chime said that after closing the bank “will focus primarily on supporting Chime’s consumer business” and did not address those other programs. What happens to them when a competitor owns the sponsor bank is unsaid. The read-through for other fintechs that still rent a charter is untested Tuesday night.

Outlook, shares, and funds

Alongside the deal, Chime raised its 2026 revenue outlook for a second time in five weeks. It now expects full-year revenue of $2.76 billion-$2.77 billion, or growth of 26% to 27%. That is a $30 million lift at the midpoint from the $2.725 billion-$2.745 billion range it set on August 5. The new annual figures are Chime’s own outlook, not a close of the Stride books: closing is not expected until 2027.

The cash session had already ended. Chime closed at $32.31, down 4.3%, on a release timed at 4:05 p.m. Eastern. In after-hours trading it was at $35.25 as of 8 p.m. Eastern, 9.1% above that close.

Chime is a 5.0% position in the iShares FinTech Active ETF CBPAY, an actively managed financial-technology sleeve, and 4.5% of Fidelity’s Disruptive Finance ETF BFDFF, which buys digital banking and payments names. etf.net grades BFDFF a B and CBPAY a C, each scored only against funds that make the same promise. Eighty-seven funds in etf.net’s universe hold the stock. No fund holder’s exposure changes until the regulators act.

The shares that rose after hours are a claim on a charter Chime does not yet own. Until the Fed and the OCC act, it remains a technology company whose members’ deposits sit at someone else’s bank. The first half of 2027 is when that would change, and only if both regulators say yes.