Chime agrees to acquire Stride Bank for $590 million, securing a national charter
The deal gives the neobank its own bank holding company structure for the first time, with Stride set to be renamed Chime Bank, N.A. once regulators clear the transaction.
Chime has agreed to acquire Stride Bank, N.A. for $590 million in cash, a deal that would give the consumer fintech a national bank charter and full-stack banking infrastructure it has never owned outright, the company said.
Stride Bank is the Oklahoma-chartered bank that has issued Chime's cards and held its customers' deposits under a sponsor-bank arrangement — the standard structure fintechs use to offer banking products without a charter of their own, in which the bank, not the fintech, is the regulated entity holding the money. Buying that sponsor outright inverts the relationship: Chime becomes the bank's owner rather than its customer.
Under the announced terms, Stride would be renamed Chime Bank, N.A. and continue operating as a wholly owned subsidiary once the deal closes, which the companies said they expect in the first half of 2027 pending regulatory approval. The acquisition would also make Chime a bank holding company, a status that brings its own layer of supervision — including Federal Reserve oversight of the holding company itself, on top of whatever oversight already applies to the bank.
Chime said it plans to fund the purchase from its own balance sheet rather than raising new capital for the deal. The company, which went public earlier in 2026, has previously said a chartered bank of its own would let it move some lending and deposit products in-house instead of routing them through a third-party sponsor bank — the arrangement that left Synapse-linked fintechs and their end customers exposed when that middleware provider collapsed in 2024.
Owning the bank does not exempt Chime from the third-party and program-oversight scrutiny that sponsor-bank arrangements have drawn from regulators in recent years; it shifts Chime from being the sponsored party to being the supervised bank itself, with the compliance obligations that status carries. The deal remains subject to approval from bank regulators, and the 2027 timeline leaves room for the structure to shift before it closes.