Chime is the largest digital bank in the United States. The bank provides all services exclusively online without any physical offices. Clients receive a Visa debit card, expense, and savings accounts free of charge. And all movements of funds can be monitored through the mobile application.
Chime is one of Millennials’ most convenient, popular, and expensive financial tools at the moment. Neobank was founded in 2013 by neighbors and childhood friends Ryan King and Chris Britt. Ryan is a software developer, and Chris is the Chief Product Officer of Green Dot Corporation, a financial holding company, and former Chief Product Officer of Visa.
Chris and Ryan had many conversations about online banking and how to simplify traditional banking as much as possible. That’s how the idea was born and in 2012 the friends rented an office in San Francisco, hired 12 people, and in a few months created an app that provided customers with free mobile bank accounts and Visa debit cards with ATM access.
In its first four years, Chime was able to attract about 1 million customers, and in 2019, the company generated $200 million in revenue and became a “unicorn” – a startup with a valuation of over $1 billion. Today, the banking app has about 15 million users.
Chime is the undisputed leader among purely digital banks – the company doesn’t have a banking license, but it partners with Bancorp Bank and Stride Bank and offers banking products like checking and savings accounts through them.
What is Chime?
Chime is the name of the most popular neo-bank in the United States, founded in 2012 and reaching 10 million customers in less than a decade. Chime denies bank fees, earns on customer mistakes, offers cashback, and encourages a savings program that rewards those who put away even a small amount each month.
In terms of visual identity, Chime is very interesting and memorable. Everything from the chosen color palette to the style of the wordmark creates an image of a progressive and confident company.
The logo of the Chime company, designed in 2012, features a bright green and white composition with just one element — a stylized wordmark, written against a solid background in the lowercase of a modern sans-serif typeface. The clean contours of the characters are diluted by the designer “M”, which has a loop in the center and represents connection and accessibility.
The distinctive lowercase lettering from the primary logo of the Chime bank is set in a modern sans-serif typeface, with a stylized letter “M”. The closest fonts to the one, used in this insignia, are, probably, Ringo, Teorema Sans, or Souses, with some visible modifications of the characters’ contours.
As for the color palette of the Chime visual identity, it is based on a bright shade of green, which symbolizes wealth and growth, and white, a sign of transparency, trustworthiness, and high quality.