Matthew Newcomb
Analyst · JPMorgan
Thanks, Chris. Q4 capped off a landmark year for Chime, our shareholders and our financial position. We went public, strengthened our balance sheet and continued to drive strong financial results. In 2025, we delivered 31% revenue growth and significant operating leverage, growing our adjusted EBITDA margin by 12 percentage points year-over-year in Q4, each ahead of our guidance. And we expect to maintain this momentum in 2026 with a clear line of sight to strong growth and further operating leverage, including GAAP profitability for the balance of the year, an important milestone that we expect to achieve ahead of previous internal expectations. But first, let's discuss Q4. Our third consecutive quarter of strong results as a public company when we again exceeded our prior guidance on both top and bottom lines. We grew revenue by 25% year-over-year and transaction profit by 31% year-over-year in Q4, compounding growth even as we fully lapped 2024's launch of MyPay. We've done this by continuing to execute across multiple dimensions of growth: active members, average revenue per active member or ARPAM, and transaction margin. In Q4, we added approximately 500,000 net new active members quarter-over-quarter and 1.5 million year-over-year. Of course, our actives aren't just any actives. They're deeply engaged, a result of our relentless focus on serving our members in a primary account capacity. Our average active member transacts with us 55 times per month that is very different from other fintechs with single-point solutions whose comparable metric is often in single digits. We have a fundamentally different customer relationship. Primary accounts drive consistent and resilient top of wallet spend, provide us an underwriting advantage through our privileged repayment position and give us a unique opportunity to cross-sell and deepen engagement even further over time. This results in consistent, durable and long-lasting member cohorts. Our oldest cohorts are now nearly a decade old and are generating more transaction profit now than they did pre-COVID, and that's net of churn. And our cohort performance is getting even better. Building on our success in H1 with our early engagement initiatives, which made it easier to get started with Chime. In Q4, we improved the quality of our new cohorts in several other areas. First, in Q4, we saw a record high number of new members convert to direct deposit. Second, we continue to grow engagement. Our new cohorts are attaching to more products faster, including with many of the products we launched and scaled in 2025, like our new Chime Card, MyPay, Outbound Instant Transfer and Instant Loans. Members using 6 or more products each month now make up 15% of our actives, up from 5% 2 years ago. Finally, fueled by these increasing levels of product attach, we've also grown monetization. This is particularly true in our newest cohorts, we are seeing members do more of their spend on Chime Card, compared to prior cohorts that transacted more on debit. Chime Card earns us approximately 175 basis points on purchase volume, compared to under 100 basis points on debit. Taken together, we've strengthened the quality of our new member cohorts while continuing to acquire at attractive CAC, yielding 5 to 6 quarter transaction profit payback periods, and LTV to CACs of over 8x. In Q4, overall ARPAM increased 5% year-over-year and 21% over 2 years to $257, driven by the strength in both payments and platform-related revenue. Our tenured cohorts have reached ARPAM of nearly $400. In terms of transaction volumes, we continue to see very steady spend trends consistent with a resilient consumer. Combined purchase an OIT volumes grew 16% in Q4, fueling payments and OIT revenue growth of 21% year-over-year, an acceleration from Q3, driven by higher take rates on Chime Card and OIT. Platform-related revenue increased 47% year-over-year or 37% year-over-year, excluding OIT. One additional contributor to ARPAM growth is Instant Loans, our up to $1,000 installment loan product with terms of 3 to 12 months. Instant Loans complement our short-term liquidity product offerings to meet our members' larger, more episodic liquidity needs. We originated approximately $400 million of Instant Loans in 2025. And as of Q4, 10% of active members had an open loan. We expect Instant Loans to scale further in 2026 and like we demonstrated with SpotMe and MyPay, unit economics improve significantly as the portfolio matures. We've seen as much as 50% lower loss rates for repeat borrowers compared to first-time borrowers. In Q4, we increased transaction margin to 72%, up from 69% in Q3, a result of delivering on 2 critical strategic priorities that we committed to as part of our IPO last summer, completing our ChimeCore migration and reducing MyPay loss rate to 1%. In addition to the velocity and innovation benefits that ChimeCore unlocks, the final stage of our migration also drove a 200 basis point increase in our gross margin, helping us close in on our long-term target of 90%. This improvement alongside our faster-than-expected progress to our 1% steady-state loss rate target on MyPay, helped us grow annualized transaction profit to $1.7 billion in Q4, up 31% year-over-year. Finally, alongside our strong growth, we continued to drive operating leverage with $57 million of adjusted EBITDA in Q4. In Q4, non-GAAP OpEx as a percent of revenue fell 9 percentage points year-over-year. Our adjusted EBITDA margin growth accelerated further with 12 percentage points improvement year-over-year in Q4, the largest margin improvement of any quarter in 2025. In our first call as a public company, we committed to delivering an uptick in profitability in the back half of 2025, and that's exactly what we did. The 57% incremental adjusted EBITDA margin we delivered in Q4 exceeded our initial guide as well as the higher bar we set for ourselves on our last call. So meaningful progress last year, but we're even more excited about the opportunity ahead. We believe we're extremely well positioned entering 2026 with a number of tailwinds that will support both continued strong top line growth, even faster transaction profit growth and further bottom line margin expansion this year. First, we're the market leader in account openings and the #1 brand in banking. In 2026, we expect to continue delivering steady and predictable growth in our core business, powered by a growing member base and their resilience everyday nondiscretionary spend. Second, we have several strong top line tailwinds exiting 2025, including Chime Card, driving higher take rates, a new variable MyPay pricing model, unlocking further scale and higher monetization. In our Instant Loans products ramping across our member base with strengthening unit economics. Third, our new products and go-to-market priorities that Chris outlined, including new premium membership tiers, investment accounts, joint accounts and Chime Enterprise will set the stage for continued growth in 2026 and in years to come. And finally, we'll do all of this without needing to grow our headcount, thanks to efficiencies from ChimeCore, and our ongoing AI initiatives. Turning to our guide. In Q1, we expect revenue between $627 million and $637 million, resulting in year-over-year revenue growth between 21% and 23%. We expect adjusted EBITDA between $90 million and $95 million and adjusted EBITDA margin of 14% to 15%. For full year '26, we expect revenue between $2.63 billion and $2.67 billion, resulting in year-over-year revenue growth between 20% and 22%, and adjusted EBITDA between $380 million and $400 million. An adjusted EBITDA margin between 14% and 15%. This represents 8 to 9 points of margin expansion year-over-year and an incremental adjusted EBITDA margin of over 55%. And as mentioned previously, we expect to be GAAP profitable for the balance of the year. There are a few things to keep in mind about our Q1 and full year outlook. First, we have a seasonal business, specifically, Q1 is tax refund season, but we like to call the most wonderful time of the year. Each Q1, with the increased activity resulting from members receiving their tax refunds, we see seasonally higher purchase volume, ARPAM, transaction margin and net new active member additions. And in each Q2, we see a normalization of these seasonal trends. with significantly fewer net new active member additions than in other quarters and lower sequential purchase volume, payments revenue and transaction margin. This Q1, we also expect to benefit from larger-than-usual tax refunds resulting from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which would magnify the seasonality. It's still early. We haven't yet hit the peak of tax season, and the timing of this year's refunds are a bit later than in the years prior. That said, so far, refunds are tracking higher, in line with our expectations. More broadly, for the full year, we will continue making progress across our growth framework, active members, ARPAM and transaction margin. As the market share leader in new account openings, we expect to maintain strong momentum and net new active member additions this year. For the full year, our goal is to add approximately 1.4 million net new actives at attractive ROI, building on the increasingly strong cohort quality we saw in Q4. We will also continue to drive ARPAM growth as we scale Chime Card, MyPay and Instant Loans, helping us grow LTVs and reinforce our strong cohort quality. And finally, we expect transaction margins remain consistent with Q4 '25 level as we realize the ongoing benefits of lower transaction processing costs from our ChimeCore migration. From an OpEx perspective, as Chris noted, we're excited about our road map this year and plan to invest in sales and marketing behind our new product launches, particularly in Q2 when we plan to launch our new premium membership tier. With that, I will open it up to Q&A.