Chime has added investing to its banking app, becoming the latest neobank to bet that the fastest way to acquire assets under management is to build it into an account customers already check five times a day. Chime Invest launches with a $1 minimum, commission-free stock and ETF trades, and an expert-managed portfolio option built by Atomic Invest, an SEC-registered adviser, with access rolling out gradually over the coming weeks.
The pricing signals what Chime is optimizing for: no management fee for Chime Prime members, 0.10 percent annually for Chime Plus, and 0.25 percent for standard accounts, undercutting the fee structures that kept many first-time investors out of the market. “The hardest part of investing is often getting started and sticking with it,” said CEO and co-founder Chris Britt. “By bringing investing into the app they already know and love, we’re making it easier to turn saving into investing.” Chime points to its own data that members already transact more than 50 times a month within the app, and to a survey in which cost of advice and lack of time were the top barriers keeping the 40 percent of Americans who own no stock on the sidelines.
The original insight here is sequencing, not the product itself: Chime spent years building the daily-use habit (paychecks, spending, savings) before adding investing on top of it, the reverse of how legacy brokerages have tried to add banking features to win deposits. That mirrors the path Revolut has taken toward a full banking license: neobanks are converging on the same end state, a single app covering spend, save, and invest, from opposite starting points, and whichever habit a provider locks in first increasingly determines which products customers accept from it next.
Source: Chime
