Chime Posts Second Straight Profitable Quarter With $670 Million in Revenue

SAN FRANCISCO — Chime, the consumer neobank, reported revenue of $669.8 million for the second quarter, which ended June 30, and net income of roughly $27.85 million — its second consecutive quarter of GAAP profitability. The company disclosed the results on Aug. 5.

Two straight profitable quarters is a meaningful marker for a company of Chime’s type. Consumer fintechs that scaled through the last decade largely did so on a growth-first model, subsidizing customer acquisition and deferring profitability, and the shift to reporting positive net income under standard accounting rules — rather than an adjusted metric of the company’s own construction — is the transition public-market investors have been waiting to see across the category.

Chime does not hold a bank charter. It partners with chartered banks that hold customer deposits and issue its cards, and earns much of its revenue from interchange — the fee merchants pay when a customer swipes — rather than from lending spread or account fees. That structure has shaped its product, which emphasizes fee-light checking-style accounts, early access to direct-deposited paychecks and fee-free overdraft up to set limits.

The interchange-centric model has a specific sensitivity worth understanding when reading a revenue figure like this one. Because a large share of Chime’s revenue is a function of how much its customers spend on their cards rather than how much they borrow, its top line is tied closely to everyday transaction volume among a customer base that skews toward younger and lower-to-middle-income households — the same households most exposed to the consumer-budget pressures showing up elsewhere in recent credit data.

That reliance on interchange also carries a longer-term regulatory dimension. Interchange rates, particularly the treatment of smaller banks under debit-interchange rules, have periodically been the subject of legislative and regulatory attention, and the economics of neobanks built on bank-partner interchange depend on those rules staying broadly favorable. Chime’s profitability milestone is real, but the durability of the revenue underneath it is partly a policy question, not only an execution one.

For now, the results give Chime something it could not previously point to: a track record, however short, of making money under the same accounting standard its public-market peers are judged by. Whether that holds through a genuine downturn in its customers’ spending is the test the next several quarters will pose.