

Financial services company Chime Financial Inc. announced today that it has filed a Form S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as part of a plan to go public later this year on the Nasdaq exchange.
Chime has applied to list its Class A common stock under the ticker symbol CHYM. The company did not disclose the number of shares it plans to offer or their price ranges. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC and J.P. Morgan are acting as book-running managers for the offering.
The filing did, however, include financials for Chime. It disclosed that it generated $12.7 million in net income on revenue of $518.7 million, up 32% year-over-year in the March quarter, making it a rare tech-related company to go public while already profitable.
As of the end of March, Chime also had 8.6 million active customers, which it calls members, up 23% year-over-year and average revenue per active customer was $251, up from $231 in the same quarter of the previous year.
Founded in 2012, Chime was created to offer a more consumer-friendly alternative to traditional banks with an added emphasis on transparency and low fees. The company partners with FDIC-insured banks like The Bancorp Bank and Stride Bank to provide banking services while focusing on mobile-first, digital-only delivery.
Chime’s core offerings include a fee-free checking account, a high-yield savings account and a secured credit card called “Credit Builder,” which is designed to help users improve their credit scores. Additional features such as “SpotMe” allow customers to overdraft their accounts up to a certain limit with no fees and “MyPay” provides early access to paychecks.
Differing from traditional banks that rely on fees and lending, Chime makes most of its revenue from interchange fees charged to merchants when customers use their Chime debit cards. The model has allowed the company to scale quickly while avoiding many of the overhead costs associated with brick-and-mortar banking.
Chime’s IPO filing comes at a time when markets have been all over the place, depending on what the latest news of tariff negotiations delivers. But even before the current U.S. administration took office, the market for IPOs had been quiet for some years, with 2024 seeing only $149.2 billion in exit value, mostly coming from a handful of IPOs.
The good news is that Chime is not the only fintech or broader tech company currently planning to go public, in what perhaps could be a small sign of recovery in IPOs. Stablecoin firm Circle Internet Group Inc. announced plans to go public on April 1, while collaborative design software startup Figma Inc. also announced on April 15. And just today, stock and crypto trading site eToro priced its IPO at $52 per share ahead of its Nasdaq debut Wednesday morning.
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