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I don't see how anyone can take Chime seriously. I have a habit of checking out most new free banking apps, looking for the best deals, UI, security, etc. Chime immediately started sending my phone notifications with tons of emojis in them. It felt completely childish and I couldn't believe this was a legitimate company that people would put tons of money into.
This happens on the regular with established "normal" banks in the UK and other EU countries. I believe US banks also have the right to suspend accounts for "fraudulent activity", correct me if I'm wrong. Therefore, you can't expect banking startups to be any better. Fix it on a higher level.
The article starts out by comparing Chime to "normal banks" that haven't attracted nearly the same level of complaints; the situation may not be unique to Chime, but those banking with, well, banks apparently haven't been running nearly the same risk of "we took your money too bad so sad".
But guess what, I was still a customer of the bank. I had all the resources I'd normally have: customer support.
From there, they shipped me a new card. I was still unable to buy groceries for a day or two, but I never lost access to my money.
I can guess as to what is going on here.
I am not sure if my NDA still covers me talking about stuff there, but most likely is what has happened was folks either: not using their accounts (this will trigger eventual closer) or legitimately engaging in practices that would be... improper in any banking system. It's important to note that Chime is not a bank either. These closing actually most likely happened BECAUSE of Bancorp, and not because Bancorp wasn't policing Chime properly. There is a lot of CSR practices that occur there that aren't great and that is mostly due to the fact they refuse(d?) to spend the money to scale up the actual human teams as well as finding folks who also didn't want to rip chime off themselves from the CSR department (I know of one such case that I can't get into).
They are having serious growing pains which imo still is of course no excuse for not caring for the customers, but I have seen a lot of these cases and I have seen a lot of what people have been doing then run to the media to complain about, Chime doesn't just willy nilly close accounts without a serious reason. A lot of the times the customers are mad they couldn't pull a fast one on the risk team... Anyway, I am not really here to defend them. If you have any other questions I could probably answer them.
That said, I chalk this up to their massive size (well over 12,000,000 customers) and a large portion of refusing to scale up Human Resources and instead trying to use to tech to deal with a lot of this. A few complaints like this aren't all that weird, bigger banks have way more complaints and do way worse things.
Edit: I really can't talk about what I know would cause these things to happen, as, it would tip of fraudsters or people who legit have the feds after them. But the tools we used to figure this stuff out were pretty advanced.
Edit 2: In my tenure, I saw lots of systematic fraud and also saw lots of those exact people take to social media to complain about it. That is anecdotal of course. But I saw a lot of shit that would blow your minds. I also saw many individuals engaging in fraud that they may not have even realized was fraud. One such example was the everyday Jane/John trying to deposit the same check multiple times when they knew full and well it was deposited first. Not to mention the number of dick picks people sent in via check deposit. Thanks to patents from other banks I was not allowed to deploy the ML platform I built for the mobile app to capture ONLY the check and its information, as opposed to human parts that shouldn't be in the picture.
Edit 3: Again, I am not defending them, but if you are not in Finance then honestly you're out of your depth understanding what is going on here. No offense.
Edit 4: This also reminds me of the time Bancorp went down for like 3 days and everyone took to twitter to say that China hacked Chime which was both funny, sad, and scary. Of course that isn't what happened, Bancorp is just fucking shitty.
I don't see how anyone can take Chime seriously. I have a habit of checking out most new free banking apps, looking for the best deals, UI, security, etc. Chime immediately started sending my phone notifications with tons of emojis in them. It felt completely childish and I couldn't believe this was a legitimate company that people would put tons of money into.
> Chime is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by The Bancorp Bank or Stride Bank, N.A.; Members FDIC Regardless of this, those bank accounts are still FDIC insured, and thus they're subject to the same regulations, right? When I closed my Bank of America account they were insistent that any transactions or deposits after it was closed would be mailed to me in the form of a bill or a…
IAAL but this is not legal advice. It sounds like it depends. If the bank has good reason to believe the funds are fraudulently sourced, then it may lawfully be entitled to hold them until it can be shown (either to their satisfaction, or to the satisfaction of a court) that the funds are legitimate.
That being said, the article makes me think this is the custody bank’s AML process at work and Chime wasn’t prepared for the customer service aspect of on-boarding a bunch of “high risk” clients and then almost immediately having those accounts closed due to the risk assessment.
I don't see how anyone can take Chime seriously. I have a habit of checking out most new free banking apps, looking for the best deals, UI, security, etc. Chime immediately started sending my phone notifications with tons of emojis in them. It felt completely childish and I couldn't believe this was a legitimate company that people would put tons of money into.
This is why crypto is the future
Let's say they have a 3rd party managing their keys so they don't lose them, well congratulations you just reinvented banking but in a way that inherently destroys the environment.
I don’t understand why people choose a bank based on anything except excellent customer service. Its the one thing you need from them urgently when something inevitably fucks up.
> Chime is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by The Bancorp Bank or Stride Bank, N.A.; Members FDIC Regardless of this, those bank accounts are still FDIC insured, and thus they're subject to the same regulations, right? When I closed my Bank of America account they were insistent that any transactions or deposits after it was closed would be mailed to me in the form of a bill or a…
IAAL but this is not legal advice. It sounds like it depends. If the bank has good reason to believe the funds are fraudulently sourced, then it may lawfully be entitled to hold them until it can be shown (either to their satisfaction, or to the satisfaction of a court) that the funds are legitimate.