• Chime has launched Chime Invest, allowing users to trade stocks and ETFs commission-free or choose an Atomic Invest-managed portfolio.
• The new feature aims to lower investing barriers with no account minimums and management fees ranging from 0% to 0.25%, depending on membership tier.
• Chime Invest strengthens Chime’s push to become a broader financial platform and reflects fintech’s wider shift toward rebundling banking, investing, lending, and other services in one app.

Digital bank Chime is giving its users one more reason to spend more time in its app with the launch of Chime Invest, a new investment capability. With the new investing tool, users can buy stocks and ETFs commission-free or use an expert-managed portfolio option.

The managed accounts are managed by Atomic Invest, an SEC-registered investment adviser that offers users a diversified portfolio personalized to their goals and risk profile with up to $500,000 of protection by SIPC. For Chime Prime members, the managed accounts do not require balance minimums or charge management fees. Chime Plus members face a 0.10% annual management fee, while all other Chime members are charged 0.25% for the managed portfolio option.

According to a Gallup Economy and Personal Finance survey, around 40% of Americans report that they do not own any stock. Chime anticipates that its new investing feature will lower barriers to entry in investing by not requiring an account minimum and by offering a managed portfolio option for those who may be intimidated to make trades on their own.

“The hardest part of investing is often getting started and sticking with it,” said Chime CEO and Co-founder Chris Britt. “Millions of people already trust Chime with their money every day. By bringing investing into the app they already know and love, we’re making it easier to turn saving into investing and investing into long-term wealth.”

The average Chime member opens the app five times a day and makes approximately 50 transactions each month. Adding investing tools within its app will not only make it easy for users to begin investing, but it also gives existing investors another reason to keep their financial activity within the Chime ecosystem instead of turning to a third-party brokerage.

Chime was founded in 2012 and is well known in fintech for offering tools and services that cater to lower-to-middle income consumers. The challenger bank offers an earned wage access tool that allows users to receive their paycheck up to two days earlier when they set up direct deposit, a credit-building tool, and a feature that will spot users up to $200 to avoid account overdrafts. The fintech has three membership tiers with varying benefits based on the direct deposit amount.

The addition of Chime Invest is another example of how fintechs are rebundling multiple services into singular apps to become more comprehensive financial platforms. Instead of competing solely on checking accounts or payments, companies are increasingly layering on adjacent services such as investing, lending, insurance, financial planning, and even mobile telco plans to deepen customer relationships and increase lifetime value.

For traditional banks, the rebundling trend increases competition by demonstrating that consumers increasingly expect everyday banking and long-term wealth-building tools to coexist within a single digital experience. For fintechs, it underscores that customer engagement is becoming more valuable than customer acquisition as a competitive advantage.

Chime Invest will be generally available to members in the coming weeks.

• Walmart-backed OnePay has partnered with Upgrade to launch personal loans ranging from $1,000 to $50,000 directly within the OnePay app.
• OnePay will use existing customer data to streamline applications and underwriting, potentially extending same-day offers to eligible users.
• The partnership advances OnePay’s super app ambitions while giving Upgrade access to a larger customer base and highlighting fintech’s broader rebundling trend.

Walmart-backed digital banking platform OnePay is getting an upgrade this week. The New York-based company has teamed up with alternative lender and fellow digital banking platform Upgrade to launch Personal Loans, bringing a new element into its banking app.

With the new Personal Loans product, OnePay will allow eligible borrowers to apply for a loan ranging from $1,000 to $50,000, receive and accept an offer with APRs ranging from 7.74% to 35.99%, and pay back their loan within the OnePay app. The company sees the new product as a significant step forward in its mission to make everyday financial services simpler, more accessible, and more useful.

“Getting access to credit in America today is harder than it should be,” said OnePay CEO Omer Ismail. “It’s never been more important to give consumers access to financing that’s simple, transparent, and meets them where they already are—and we’re excited to partner with Upgrade to introduce another financing option for our customers with OnePay Personal Loans.”

Because it can leverage information customers have already shared, OnePay can reduce repetitive entry during the application process, minimizing friction. Additionally, because OnePay is able to leverage customer information such as their average daily balance, overdraft occurrences, and spending habits for underwriting purposes, it is able to extend financing offers as soon as the same day to some of its active customers.

OnePay has tapped San Francisco-based Upgrade for the lending infrastructure and expertise, offering it the ability to offer larger-dollar lending directly within its app. Founded in 2017, Upgrade offers checking and savings accounts, personal loans, credit cards, and rewards programs that focus on low fees and responsible credit usage to help consumers improve their financial lives. With more than 7.5 million customers, Upgrade has facilitated over $42 billion in credit with tools such as its Upgrade Card, which encourages customers to pay off balances quickly and avoid revolving debt and build credit responsibly.

“Our personal loans offer consumers the breathing room they need to get on the best financial path,” said Upgrade CEO and Co-founder Renaud Laplanche. “We’re proud that this partnership makes that resource more accessible to millions of OnePay customers.”

The addition of a personal lending product is a major step for OnePay, which has been building out its banking super app since it was founded in 2021. By embedding unsecured lending directly into its app, OnePay is evolving beyond a digital wallet and deposit platform into a more comprehensive financial services hub. The partnership is another example of recent rebundling efforts in fintech. Rather than building every product in-house, digital banking providers are increasingly partnering with specialized fintechs to quickly expand their offerings.

For Upgrade, the deal opens the door to OnePay’s growing customer base, while OnePay gains proven lending infrastructure and underwriting expertise without taking on the complexity of developing it internally. As competition among digital banking platforms intensifies, strategic partnerships like this one are becoming an increasingly common way to deepen customer relationships and increase engagement.

• Swift launched a blockchain-based ledger that lets banks move tokenized deposits across borders 24/7 before completing final settlement through existing banking systems.
• The ledger is designed to make blockchain interoperable with bank infrastructure, giving financial institutions a shared layer for digital money without requiring them to abandon current rails or compliance processes.
• Seventeen global banks will participate in the initial pilot, moving Swift’s blockchain work from prototype to live testing with major transaction banks across six continents.

Swift has officially launched its new blockchain-based ledger that will support 24/7 cross-border payments with tokenized deposits, enabling funds to move in any regulated form, anywhere, with a high level of security.

The shared, blockchain-based ledger offers banks an orchestration layer for bank-issued tokenized deposits on their own ledgers. The blockchain ledger enables banks to move funds for customers 24 hours a day, seven days a week, before completing final settlement through the banks’ existing systems. In addition to always-on settlement, banks can offer clients global liquidity while maintaining compliance, credit, risk, and control standards.

“With our new ledger capability, we’re extending the trust and stability of established finance into the frontiers of digital money,” said Swift Chief Business Officer Thierry Chilosi. “It allows tokenized value to move across borders with the velocity and flexibility modern commerce expects, while maintaining the same high levels of resiliency, security, and compliance global finance requires. The strong support from banks shows the practical value of this approach—one that will help scale benefits globally while creating a foundation for future innovation in areas like programmable money and agentic commerce.”

Unlike other new payments technology, Swift’s ledger brings blockchain-based payments into the infrastructure banks already use. While previous digital money efforts were fragmented across pilots, private networks, and bank-specific systems, Swift’s approach gives banks a shared layer for moving tokenized value across borders while preserving the compliance, resiliency, and settlement processes that each region requires. Rather than asking banks to abandon existing rails, Swift is positioning the blockchain as an interoperable layer that can work alongside them.

Today’s announcement comes ten months after Swift teased the launch of its ledger, testing a prototype blockchain with more than 30 financial institutions across the globe. This is the first use case for Swift’s ledger, which the cooperative anticipates will set a new precedent for interoperability on payments infrastructure. Swift has made it clear that it will offer fee transparency and a faster, more consistent customer experience. Today’s upgrades to the ledger move Swift’s blockchain ambitions out of the experimentation phase and into a live pilot with some of the world’s largest transaction banks.

Swift reports that the speed of payments on the new blockchain-based network exceeds current standards. “A full 75 percent of payments on the network reach beneficiary banks within 10 minutes, and often in seconds, and the cooperative is going even further to advance the industry to meet the G20 targets for international transactions,” the company states. The member-owned cooperative plans to expand the network functionality and availability after an initial pilot phase that will include 17 banks from six continents. Among the pilot banks are ANZ, BNP Paribas, BNY, Citi, DBS, First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB), FirstRand Bank Limited, HSBC, Itaú Unibanco, Lloyds Bank, Mashreq, MUFG Bank, OCBC, Standard Chartered, UBS, UOB, and Wells Fargo.

“We see interoperability as the key enabler for scaling tokenized deposits beyond individual institutions,” said UBS Managing Director, Group Head of Digital Assets Mr. Andreas Kubli. “Swift’s ledger is an important industry initiative that can help connect digital money networks, supporting real-time settlement, greater liquidity mobility and the broader adoption of tokenized payments and digital assets across the global financial ecosystem.”

Photo by Sonny Sixteen

• Narmi has unveiled AI Decision Assist, an agentic AI tool that automates account opening reviews by analyzing identity, risk, and compliance data and generating explainable recommendations for bank employees.
• The configurable platform helps banks tailor AI-driven decisioning to their own risk policies, reducing manual review times from hours to minutes and increasing approval rates by up to 6%.
• The launch is an example of how banks are increasingly deploying AI to support operational decision-making in areas like account opening, fraud detection, underwriting, and compliance rather than limiting AI to customer-facing assistants.

Digital banking platform Narmi announced the planned launch of AI Decision Assist today. The new agentic AI tool aims to help banks automate the account opening review process.

AI Decision Assist takes on the heavy lifting when it comes to reviewing customer applications. In addition to analyzing identity, risk, and compliance information, the tool also generates recommendations that help employees make faster, informed, and explainable decisions based on each bank’s own history of approved, flagged, and declined applications. Each decision is traceable and offers transparency into the decision-making process.

Narmi built AI Decision Assist to be configurable, allowing each bank to tailor the tool to its own risk appetite and operational processes. By automating much of the review process, the platform reduces manual review times from hours to minutes, enabling banks to make faster decisions at scale. It also helps institutions identify applicants they might have otherwise overlooked, increasing approval rates by up to 6%, according to Narmi.

“Account opening remains one of the most time-intensive workflows for financial institutions, often relying on fragmented systems and manual review processes that require employees to gather information from multiple sources before making a decision,” said Narmi Co-founder Chris Griffin. “AI Decision Assist is designed to dramatically fix that problem by fitting in seamlessly into existing workflows, helping teams make better decisions faster while eliminating one of the most time-consuming and cumbersome parts of account opening.”

Narmi’s announcement shows how banks are starting to think differently about AI. Over the past two years, most banks have focused on customer-facing AI assistants that answer questions or summarize information. Now, AI is increasingly moving into the back office to support operational decision-making. From account opening and fraud detection to underwriting and compliance, banks are increasingly using AI to analyze and recommend actions.

New York-based Narmi was founded in 2016 to offer banks the digital banking tools they need to increase profitability, deposits, and accounts. The company offers a FedNow service, commercial and retail digital banking tools, digital account opening capabilities, analytics, and an administrative portal.

In an era when banks are letting go of competent employees in favor of AI, like Starling’s recent layoff of 130 employees, Narmi made it clear that AI Decision Assist is meant to work alongside employees instead of replacing them. The company said that it is instead designed to free employees from repetitive research and administrative work. Instead of replacing humans, the tool aims to preserve oversight, auditability, and accountability.

Photo by Mikhail Nilov