SDNY COURTHOUSE, Sept 9 – Chime
Financial, the publicly traded fintech that serves more
than 10 million active members with a payments-focused
digital banking product (in many cases, high cost loans)
now proposes to buy Stride Bank, National Association,
Enid, Oklahoma, for $590 million in cash, converting a
seven-year banking-partner relationship into outright
ownership.
The deal, said to expect to close in the
first half of 2027, would rename Stride "Chime Bank" and
make it a wholly owned subsidiary, subject to approval by
both the OCC, Stride's primary (de)regulator as a national
bank, and the Federal Reserve, which is still withholding
8 pages of questions to high cost lender Enova.
Chime's own stated rationale
is candid about what direct bank ownership buys it that a
partnership couldn't: eliminating partner-bank fees,
lowering funding costs, and letting Chime "serve consumers
in all 50 states" through "a more direct structure." That
is the now-familiar fintech playbook Inner City Press has
tracked all year, from OppFi to Zerohash: a company that
has run its business through a chartered bank's
infrastructure deciding it would rather own the charter
than keep sharing revenue and control with a
partner.
Stride's most recent CRA Performance
Evaluation, conducted by the OCC and dated August 4, 2025,
typically rates the bank Satisfactory overall — but the
components behind that rating are weak. Both the
Investment Test and the Service Test are rated Needs to
Improve, one level above the worst possible rating,
Substantial Noncompliance. The exam states plainly that
Stride's investment performance was "poor" in Oklahoma and
"very poor" in Utah, with current and prior-period
investments representing "less than one percent of total
tier 1 capital." Service delivery fared little better:
"poor" in both states, with the bank providing "few, if
any" community development services, a finding the exam
says had "a negative impact on service performance."
Even the Lending Test, the only category to
avoid a Needs to Improve rating, is described as showing
"poor performance" specifically in Utah. The same
exam separately discusses Stride's existing
fintech-partnership business model directly: a secured
credit card program "offered to all customers with a
deposit account through a specific fintech relationship,"
with no underwriting performed and no preset credit limit
— the kind of product Chime itself specializes in
providing.
Whether that existing relationship is with
Chime specifically or another fintech partner, the exam
confirms Stride already operates substantially as the kind
of bank-behind-a-fintech-brand that Chime now wants to
bring fully in-house. A bank with two of three CRA
test categories rated Needs to Improve is precisely the
kind of institution full examination exists to catch and
press for correction. Whether that scrutiny continues at
the same level once Stride becomes a wholly owned Chime
subsidiary, and whether the OCC's own pending proposal to
raise the CRA exam threshold to $10 billion affects future
examination of the combined entity, are the questions this
deal raises going forward. That and who's next: Dave?
Cleo? Watch this site