Chris Britt, Chime’s CEO, looks like the dad next door: Jeff Bezos before the Bond-villain head-shave and supervillain yacht.

At Money 20/20 two years ago, he got a rockstar intro on a glowing stage in a room as dark as a black box theater with the lights out.

The rockstar next door took a seat to talk about customer primacy in consumer banking. It was dreadfully dull, especially with a Money 20/20 hangover.

Beneath Chime’s branding, that was the point.

Earlier this month, Chime announced that it would buy one of its two sponsor banks; the news dropped and the trade press (we) went wild: “CHIME BOUGHT A BANK!!!” 

Listen to Chris Britt in May: “It's, to some degree, an inevitability that we'll become a bank; the question is just, when?” September was the kickoff.

Chime is relentless about cost and margin, marketing excluded. In the annals of neobank history, that was vividly out of fashion.

It’s discipline that defines being a bank. Becoming a bank happened in reverse, managing cost and margin with primacy as the North Star. Roughly:

Add products. Repeat. Then buy a bank.

Chime built its own core ledger, payment processing, fraud and risk decisioning, and data management systems. It's gone “premium” with Chime+, on top of a secured credit card, a savings product, stock investing, and flat-fee, short-term lending.

(It has also sponsored a patch on the Mavericks’ jerseys.)

Then, it announced the $590M cash deal for one of its partners, the $5.4B Stride Bank.

A Bloomberg headline passed unnoticed, it seems: Fintech Chime Explores Stablecoins as New Feature on Its App.

In March, Chime sent a request for proposal to stablecoin infrastructure companies for “end-to-end stablecoin wallet services,” according to Bloomberg. 

Chime’s core market is consumers underserved by traditional banks, and it designs products to pass that test. Crypto primacy is owned by the likes of Coinbase and Kraken.

This is not about a consumer wallet for its own sake; the headline overshot the article, which focused on infrastructure.

The reported RFP hints at stablecoin-based payment processing that gets real once Chime owns banking’s economics—from the tech stack to the rights and responsibilities of a bank license. Bloomberg reported that the stablecoin infrastructure startup Rain got one.

Taken as fact, the RFP cracks open the door to what Chime wants. 

Chime could be tinkering. It could be building stablecoin features: Embedded wallets, stablecoin payments, onramps and offramps, stablecoin-funded card payments.

It could be future-proofing cost and margin. That’s the most interesting case.

The RFP could imply how Chime looks at payments infrastructure, in the context of its cost- and margin-focused model that underpins the drive for customer primacy.

Chime keeps talking about primacy (boring, like the dad-rockstar next door). Customers don’t need to know the back end. Just the experience.

As a bank, it could blend stablecoin rails with legacy payments, if you call RTP and FedNow old, or wallets with dollar deposit accounts.

It could happen if it cut costs or expanded margins (stablecoin transactions can cost cents. But a penny or two per item is roughly on par with what the Fed charges for FedNow and an ACH item costs a fraction of a cent.

With stablecoins’ youth, it’s hard to say now. Maybe Chime doesn’t know yet—and it’s just asking for prices.

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