Bank of Charles Town to Digitize its Commercial Lending Experience in Partnership with Jack Henry

Bank of Charles Town to Digitize its Commercial Lending Experience in Partnership with Jack Henry

The latest chapter in Bank of Charles Town’s digital transformation was written today. The West Virginia-based financial institution announced that it is collaborating with Jack Henry & Associates to digitize its commercial lending operations.

“We selected Jack Henry’s lending platform because it supports our broader digital banking strategy,” Bank of Charles Town (BCT) Vice President Anthony J. Ranghelli said. “The platform will help us grow with scale and efficiency while improving everyone’s experience. Our immediate goal for the next few years is to expand our digital lending footprint geographically to support businesses in neighboring communities and diversify our portfolio.”

Bank of Charles Town has spent the past few years investing in digital banking solutions, including a new website, digital wallets, and mobile deposit functionality. This week’s announcement will enable the FI to move away from the manual backend processes that have governed its previous loan origination system. The new technology from Jack Henry & Associates will bring new efficiencies, an improved customer experience, and streamlined workflow for employees. Ranghelli noted that the partnership will enable BCT to better serve its small and medium-sized business customers, especially “niche industries” such as dentist offices and law firms which he called “a priority for our bank.”

Founded in 1871 by a coalition of Jefferson County, West Virginia farmers and business leaders, Bank of Charles Town has grown into a $511 million-financial institution serving communities in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia; Loudon County, Virginia; and Washington County, Maryland. BCT was named a Best Bank to Work For by American Banker in 2020 for a second year in a row. Alice Frazier is President and CEO.

A Finovate alum since 2011, when the company showcased its ProfitStars division, Jack Henry & Associates finished 2021 with new partners and new functionalities for its solutions. The company announced a collaboration with Envestnet | Yodlee in December and also reported that its Jack Henry Lending platform, the centerpiece of its partnership with Bank of Charles Town, has been upgraded to include tax return spreading capabilities. This move will further reduce the amount of manual work that typically burdens the lending process and will accelerate the time to loan fulfillment.


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CRIF Partners with Swoop Funding to Help Small Businesses Unlock Working Capital

CRIF Partners with Swoop Funding to Help Small Businesses Unlock Working Capital

Late last month, credit management solutions provider CRIF announced plans to team up with Swoop Funding, a business funding and savings platform. CRIF anticipates the partnership will help the U.K.’s community of 5.9 million SMEs access more funding and ultimately grow.

Swoop will leverage CRIF’s Credit Passport business credit scoring technology that provides real time credit scores for SMEs. This tool will benefit both Swoop and the small businesses themselves. Swoop will help match businesses with funding and savings products. For businesses with lower credit scores, this will help them potentially find previously unavailable sources for working capital. The partnership will also offer SMEs insights into their businesses’ financial performance and viability, and help them see how lenders view them.

“We designed Credit Passport to remove friction in the lending decisioning process and help SMEs get the right funding for them, when they need it, as well as to help educate businesses so they can build the most financially healthy and resilient companies,” said CRIF Realtime Chief Product Officer Glen Keller. “CRIF’s partnership with Swoop puts us at the heart of the U.K.’s SMEs with useful information at a time when they need it the most and will really make a difference to the market.”

CRIF’s Credit Passport helps bridge the gap between the financial industry and business owners. The tool leverages open banking to offer lenders a view into SME’s credit quality and will give Swoop’s SME clients insight into their own business credit score.

Swoop was founded in 2018. The company’s business funding and savings platform helps SMEs discover the right funding solution– ranging from loans to equity to grants– to fit their need. Swoop also has a business financial management (BFM) spin, and offers tools to help businesses identify savings opportunities. The company has matched its more than 79,000 customers with over $187 million in funding.

Italy-based CRIF was founded in 1988 and has more than 5,500 employees working across 70+ subsidiary companies on four continents. The firm counts 10,500+ financial institutions, 600 insurance companies, and 82,000 businesses as clients. In all, one million consumers in 50 countries use CRIF’s services. In 2020, CRIF acquired PFM company Strands to complement its customer acquisition, portfolio management, and credit collection tools. Last year, CRIF participated as an investor in nine fintech funding rounds.


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Acorns Co-Founder Secures $20 Million in Funding for New Venture, Ant Money

Acorns Co-Founder Secures $20 Million in Funding for New Venture, Ant Money

Embedded finance platform Ant Money has secured $20 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Franklin Templeton’s Franklin Venture Partners, RX3 Ventures, SteelBridge Laboratories, Steelpoint Capital Partners, and Ant Money founder Walter Cruttenden. The company, whose founder also launched micro-investing platform Acorns in 2012, also completed its stock-for-stock merger with Blast. A financial services platform for gamers, Blast went live in 2018 with its Game-Based Savings technology that leverages gameplay as a way to help individuals passively fund a free savings account.

The deal brings the total number of apps on the Ant Money platform to three: ATM, Blast, and Learn & Earn. Together the trio of offerings enables users to earn money and easily fund investment accounts.

“Building an investment account early in life can help people on the road to financial success, but many people don’t start because they lack the knowledge or funds,” Ant Money’s Walter Cruttenden said. “My hope is that Ant Money, which helps people generate small amounts of money to seed accounts, can foster new growing accounts and provide increased financial security for millions.”

ATM enables users to earn micro-income by engaging anonymously with leading worldwide brands. That income can be saved or invested in the stock market via Ant Money Advisors, a registered investment company and robo advisor that is embedded in the ATM app. Users can earn a minimum of $10 for the first month of participation, and more than $100 a month afterwards if enrolled in the ATM rewards program. Learn & Earn was developed in partnership with Junior Achievement USA. The app helps users earn money by completing lessons on concepts like budgeting, launching a business, and the power of compound interest. The money earned from Learn & Earn, like the money earned via ATM, can be automatically invested in the stock market, enabling users to start saving for the future at the same time as they are learning how to be good investors.

Ant Money co-founder Michael Gleason said that the merger of the companies made sense because they shared “similar visions for helping people enter the financial investment world.” Combined with what Gleason called “overlapping management,” the companies seemed ripe for consolidation. “(It) seemed like the logical next step was to merge the companies and build a larger one together,” Gleason said.


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Credix Raises $2.5 Million

Credix Raises $2.5 Million

Decentralized credit platform Credix landed $2.5 million in early stage seed funding this week. The Belgium-based company will use the fresh capital to speed up the release of its alpha version and launch its protocol on the Solana mainnet.

DRW Cumberland and ParaFi Capital led the round. The Transfero Swiss BRZ Solana Ecosystem Fund, Solana Ventures, Parrot Finance, MGNR, Mercurial, Petrock Capital, Fuse Capital, and several angel investors also contributed.

Credix was founded just last month by Thomas Bohner, Maxim Piessen, and Chaim Finizola. The team is seeking to bridge the gap between decentralized finance and real-world assets, bringing uncollateralized loans to emerging markets, starting with Latin America.

“The rise of DeFi, crypto, and stablecoins provided Credix with all the required lego blocks to rethink the end-to-end debt capital markets flow,” said Bohner. “Credix is democratizing access to credit investing for both borrowers and investors by connecting them through a decentralized credit marketplace.”

Along with today’s funding announcement, Credix also appointed four new members to its advisory team. Chike Ukuagbu, Head of Crypto Strategy-Emerging Markets at Visa; João Bezerra Leite, Former Managing Director and CTO at Bank Itaú; Reginald de Wasseige, Investor at Augmentum; and Kenneth Bok, Managing Director Blocks, ex-Goldman Sachs will all serve as advisors to the Credix team.

In the next few weeks, Credix will launch its first credit lines for Latin American borrowers. In the first quarter of 2022, the company will extend access for underwriters and liquidity providers and will open the pool to the community within the first half of next year.


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Rocket Companies Acquire TrueBill

Rocket Companies Acquire TrueBill

Rocket Companies, the parent company of tech-driven real estate, mortgage, and financial services businesses, acquired personal finance app TrueBill today. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year for $1.28 billion in cash.

“We are very impressed with what Truebill has created – providing a simple, intuitive client experience to help its users save significant money,” said Rocket Companies CEO Jay Farner. “The company is a perfect fit for the Rocket platform. Truebill’s work helping Americans keep track of their finances and providing guidance that leads to better financial outcomes follows the same philosophy as Rocket Companies – leveraging the power of technology to remove the friction from complex transactions – and applies it to everyday life.”

Founded in 2015, TrueBill helps its 2.5 million members manage subscriptions, improve credit scores, track spending and renegotiate bills. The company analyzes $50 billion in transactions each month and has saved consumers a total of $100 million.

For Rocket Companies, the purchase will push the subsidiaries toward their goal of creating a centralized destination for consumers to manage their entire financial lives. Rocket Companies will also benefit from Truebill’s recurring revenue, which is on track to generate $100 million each year. This figure is more than double the annual revenue the company generated in 2020.

As for its own operations, Rocket Companies generates $1.3 billion each year from the monthly payments made by the organization’s 2.5 million clients for mortgage servicing.


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Data Storytelling Innovator Narrative Science Acquired by Salesforce

Data Storytelling Innovator Narrative Science Acquired by Salesforce

Narrative Science reported on Wednesday that its acquisition by Salesforce – and integration into Saleforce’s Tableau team is complete. First announced last month, the closing of the acquisition this week will combine Narrative Science’s automated data storytelling capabilities with Tableau’s analytics platform.

“Bringing the Narrative Science award-winning, world-leading AI in analytics team and their innovations to Tableau will help us reach millions more people who are underserved with data,” Tableau President and CEO Mark Nelson wrote on the company’s blog this week. “It will help close the data literacy gap, reimagine an entirely new analytics experience, and set people up for success in this digital-first world.”

Salesforce acquired Tableau Software in 2019 in a deal that combined “the world’s #1 CRM with the world’s #1 analytics platform” Tableau announced in a press release that August. The goal of the acquisition was to enable Salesforce customers to “unlock even greater value from their data” using Tableau’s combination of diverse visualization, analytics, and AI. By adding Narrative Science’s data storytelling technology, Tableau and Narrative Science move closer to their shared goal of “making data more available to everyone, everywhere.”

A Finovate alum since 2013, Narrative Science is a leading provider of automated business analytics and natural language communication technology. Founded in 2010 and headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, the company is an innovator in the field of data storytelling. As a strategy for delivering business intelligence, data storytelling transcends both data visualization and static dashboards by translating insights into easy-to-understand stories and giving business users a personalized data digest. The company’s Lexio solution, its latest iteration unveiled in the fall of 2020, serves both businesspeople who require data insights in order to do their jobs, but do not have the time or skills to become data analysts, as well as leaders of analytics teams who need to ensure that insights are accessible to and understandable by employees who can translate them into action.

“Unlike today’s typical BI tools, Lexio anticipates what employees need to know so they can make faster and better data-driven decisions,” Narrative Science co-founder and CEO Stuart Frankel said. “Data without context is useless, and Lexio brings that context and understanding to every single employee in plain language and in a consumer-like experience.”

As of this fall, Narrative Science has raised nearly $43 million in funding from investors including Jump Capital, Sapphire, and Battery Ventures. In October, the company earned a #1 ranking in Crain’s Chicago Business Most Innovative Companies 2021 roster. Over the summer, Narrative Science’s Lexio won the “AI-Based Analytics Innovation Award” at the AI Breakthrough Awards.


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Scalable Capital Goes Crypto

Scalable Capital Goes Crypto

Digital investment platform Scalable Capital launched a crypto offering this week called Scalable Crypto. The new tool, which Scalable Capital is launching in partnership with Europe’s largest digital asset investment company CoinShares, helps users invest in cryptocurrencies.

Scalable Crypto will help everyday investors participate in crypto markets by offering access to crypto investments via regulated stock exchanges in Germany. The new tool will integrate with the company’s existing wealth management and broker offerings, and will hold cryptocurrencies in secured, cold wallets at regulated custodians.

“We make trading crypto as easy as trading shares or ETFs,” said Scalable Capital Co-founder and CEO Erik Podzuweit. “Crypto currencies are well established as an asset class in a balanced portfolio. With ‘Scalable Crypto’, we are providing an affordable and intuitive offering to help even more people to enter the crypto world. The expansion is the next stage in our journey to become Europe’s leading digital investment platform.”

Scalable Capital is making it easy for crypto-novices to experiment with digital currencies. Users trade on the Xetra and gettex exchanges and do not need to open a separate wallet to do so. Instead, cryptocurrencies are held in the form of securities in the customer’s existing account. Additionally, Scalable Capital takes care of the tax details for crypto securities.

Founded in Germany in 2014, Scalable Capital was launched during the roboadvisor craze and now has more than $6.8 billion (€6 billion) under management on its platform. Today, the company offers both B2C and B2B tools. The company provides private individuals digital wealth management, a broker with a flat rate, and overnight and time deposit offers. For B2B clients, Scalable Capital develops solutions for digital investment. Some of the company’s current clients include ING, Barclays, and Santander.

Scalable Capital, which demoed its technology at FinovateEurope 2016, has 330 employees across its offices in Munich, Berlin, and London. Earlier this year, the company landed $180 million in new funding, bringing its total to more than $317 million. Scalable Capital has an estimated valuation of $1.4 billion.

Bitcoin Comes to the Mountain West Courtesy of NYDIG, Alkami, and Idaho Central Credit Union

Bitcoin Comes to the Mountain West Courtesy of NYDIG, Alkami, and Idaho Central Credit Union

A partnership between cloud-based digital banking solution provider Alkami Technology and Idaho Central Credit Union will enable ICCU members to buy and sell bitcoin within their mobile apps and on the credit union’s online banking platform. Bitcoin services are provided by cryptocurrency technology company NYDIG with Alkami’s platform facilitating the deployment.

Claiming the mantle of both the fastest growing credit union in the state, as well as one of the best performing credit unions in the country, ICCU Chief Information Officer Mark Willden said that adding new services such as bitcoin investing are key to ensuring that the credit union maintains its “momentum” and “deliver(s) additional value.” He added, “Fully integrated bitcoin services through NYDIG and the Alkami Platform take us to the next level when it comes to the member experience.”

Idaho Central Credit Union was founded in 1940 and serves more than 480,000 members throughout the state. With 1,600+ employees, ICCU has more than $8 billion in assets.

NYDIG works with Alkami to allow financial institutions to offer their customers and members bitcoin services in a secure and compliant way. NYDIG joined Alkami’s Gold Partner Program over the summer, making it easier for financial institutions to add bitcoin products and services to their offerings and provide them to their customers and members under their own brand.

“The demand for and utilization of digital currencies have expanded exponentially in recent months, leaving many FIs struggling to keep pace and retain these deposit streams within their institution,” Alkami Chief Strategy & Sales Officer Stephen Bohanon said. “Alkami’s partnershp with NYDIG further supports our mission to enable FIs to compete directly against the megabanks and challenger banks to capture this valuable market.”

A Finovate alum since 2009, making its Finovate debut as iThryv, Alkami has grown into a leading cloud-based digital banking solution provider with more than 280 financial institution customers. The company went public this spring, earning a market capitalization of $3.4 billion in its debut on the NASDAQ. Trading under the ticker ALKT.O, the Plano, Texas-based firm raised $180 million in its IPO.

Since its public listing, Alkami has forged a number of partnerships with financial institutions including STAR Bank in November and MainStreet Bank in October. Also this fall, the company announced its acquisition of digital account opening and loan origination provider MK Decision and introduced its new Chief Executive Officer Alex Shootman, formerly the CEO of Workfront. Alkami Board of Directors Chairperson Brian R. Smith said Shootman’s experience in “growing and scaling enterprise software companies” was “essential at this stage of Alkami.”

Today’s announcement from Idaho Central CU comes as NYDIG reports a massive $1 billion growth equity round that gives the company a valuation of $7 billion. The round was led by WestCap and featured participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, FinTech Collective, Affirm, FIS, Fiserv, MassMutual, Morgan Stanley, and New York Life.

The New York-based company now has a total capital of $1.4 billion. The new investment will help NYDIG further develop its platform, taking advantage of recent changes to the bitcoin protocol to introduce functionalities such as bitcoin and lightning payments, asset tokenization, and smart contracts. The company will also use the new funding to add talent to its team worldwide.

“Our roster of partnerships and strategic investors lays the foundation for NYDIG to become the leading provider of Bitcoin solutions for businesses in any industry,” NYDIG co-founder and CEO Robert Gutmann said. “(This) new equity capital will further accelerate progress towards making this exciting network accessible – and useful – to all.”


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ieDigital Announces Strategic Partnership with OutSystems

ieDigital Announces Strategic Partnership with OutSystems

One month after introducing its next generation development application platform, OutSystems has announced that it is entering a strategic partnership with fellow Finovate alum ieDigital. The alliance will enable ieDigital’s financial services company partners – ranging from bank to mortgage lenders – to access a suite of pre-built, low-code applications that support a variety of operations including originations, self-servicing, retention, and collections.

The goal of the new relationship is to give financial service providers new resources that will help accelerate growth, become more cost-efficient, and better manage risk. The partnership also allows for additional functionalities to be added as part of broader, future digital transformation efforts. One example of this would be enabling companies to analyze data collected during the completion of online applications for a new financial product or service.

“By pioneering the low-code market and having a vision to transform how enterprise software is delivered,” ieDigital Commercial Director Garry Larner said, “the OutSystems platform perfectly complements our existing product-offering. We look forward to working alongside them to continue delivering market-leading financial technology that makes a real impact to all that use it.”

ieDigital noted that the partnership will leverage and further build upon the Interact Application Suite, an approach ieDigital used in a previous collaboration with Cambridge & Counties Bank to help the firm combat financial crime. The result was a more streamlined customer onboarding process, enhanced automation for both middle and back office workers, and better capacity and knowledge to support the development of applications going forward – including an option for Cambridge & Counties Bank to build its own in-house development capability.

Founded in 1984 and headquartered in London, U.K., ieDigital demonstrated its Money Fitness solution at FinovateFall 2018. The technology helps credit unions effectively compete with the wave of competition from “digital-first” providers with a forward-looking personalized service that credit union members can use to better manage their day-to-day finances, make better financial decisions, and improve their overall financial health.

More recently, ieDigital launched its customer retention solution Interact Switch, which is designed to help mortgage lenders retain customers at product offer maturity. The technology enables mortgage lenders to function more efficiently by cutting down on paper-based, mortgage representative, and third-party costs. Also this fall, ieDigital announced a partnership with Darlington Building Society and a collaboration with DF Capital to help the savings and commercial lending bank to launch a new digital interactive channel for its savings customers.

An alum of our developers conference, FinDEVr NewYork 2017, Boston, Massachusetts OutSystems specializes in cloud-native, low-code app development. More than 14 million people currently use OutSystems’s platform to build solutions such as mobile apps and consumer websites, as well as extensions of core systems from Microsoft and Salesforce. The latest platform edition from the company, code named Project Neo, marries the productivity benefits of visual, model-based development with state-of-the-art container- and Kubernetes-based cloud architecture. The technology is hosted on Amazon Web Services to make it easy for any company to build customized, cloud-based apps that scale globally and can be continuously updated.

“Developers should be the artisans of innovation in their organization, but they are mired in complexity that stifles their ability to innovative and differentiate,” OutSystems CEO Paulo Rosado said. “Instead of using their talents to fix, change, and maintain code and aging systems, you can give them industry-leading tools that unleash their creativity on your business, and achieve massive competitive advantage.”

Klarna Taps GoCardless to Offer Bank Debit Payments

Klarna Taps GoCardless to Offer Bank Debit Payments

Consumer payment services company Klarna has selected account-to-account (A2A) payments company GoCardless to offer debit bank payments to its U.S. clients.

Specifically, Klarna will use GoCardless’ technology to transfer funds via ACH for its Pay in 4 offering that enables customers to split any purchase into four interest-free payments both online and in-store.

GoCardless CEO and Co-Founder Hiroki Takeuchi said that he anticipates alternative payment methods to experience rapid growth as leveraging debt falls out of favor. “Over the next few years we expect account-to-account payments to challenge the dominance of cards as they tap into changing consumer demand and provide merchants significant benefits in terms of cost, conversion and churn,” Takeuchi said.

Klarna CTO Koen Köppen noted that the U.S. is a key market for Klarna. The company doubled its customer base in the last year, and now has more than 21 million U.S. customers. “To continue along that trajectory,” Köppen noted, “we need partners that not only provide our consumers and retailers more choice and control but also offer us cutting-edge technology and best-in-class service. We’re excited to work with GoCardless and leverage its expertise in account-to-account payments as we expand in the U.S.”

GoCardless, which won Best Enterprise Payments Solution at the Finovate Awards earlier this year, was founded in 2011. The U.K.-based company’s technology helps merchants collect recurring and one-off payments from customers via ACH transfers. Businesses can integrate GoCardless’ API to automate payment collection and reconciliation billing for subscription and invoice payments. Among GoCardless’ clients are DocuSign, Survey Monkey, and Box.com.

Today’s news about Klarna’s new ACH payment capabilities for U.S. customers is the latest in the company’s recent push into the North American region. Last month, Klarna announced it is adding its Pay Now option to its U.S. payment services. The company also unveiled plans to launch its physical debit card in the U.S. market.

GoCardless entered the U.S. market in 2019 and has since opened two offices in New York City and one in San Francisco. By the end of next year, GoCardless plans to grow its U.S. team by another 125%.


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Trulioo Announces Partnerships with Six Cryptocurrency Companies

Trulioo Announces Partnerships with Six Cryptocurrency Companies

The announcement that global identity verification specialist Trulioo has signed up a sextet of cryptocurrency companies as its latest round of customers is a testament to the growing maturity of startups in the digital asset business. The six firms – Centbee, GMO Trust, Omni Matrix, Skilling, Strike Protocols, and Vintech Capital – will use Trulioo’s GlobalGateway to enable them to meet KYC and AML compliance requirements.

“The pandemic democratized the world of financial services, helping casual or novice investors explore financial trading online,” Trulioo CEO Steve Munford explained. “With cryptocurrencies becoming mainstream, digital asset issuers and exchanges understood the need to bolster their identity verification programs to securely and seamlessly onboard a huge uptick in users while meeting compliance obligations.”

Trulioo’s GlobalGateway gives companies access to more than 400 data sources to confidently and securely verify the identities of more than five billion individuals worldwide via a single API. The platform provides identity verification with real time comprehensive match results, ID document verification using intuitive image capture and automated verification technology, and AML (anti-money laundering) watchlists with extensive international coverage. This coverage includes sanction lists from law enforcement and government regulatory entities such as financial and securities commissions.

The solution also provides Business Verification, which Trulioo demonstrated during its most recent appearance on the Finovate stage last year at FinovateEurope in Berlin, Germany. At the conference, the company demonstrated its GlobalGateway Business Verification technology which provides regulated entities with certainty about their business customers and assures compliance with Customer Due Diligence (CDD) requirements. Leveraging key company data from government sources in more than 80 countries and from non-government sources in more than 195 countries, GlobalGateway Business Verification automates the complete Know Your Business workflow, enabling companies to verify business entity data, conduct watchlists reviews, and identify and verify a business’ beneficial owners.

Earlier this month, Trulioo announced that it was adding U.S. student records to its GlobalGateway, enabling the platform to verify 97% of the American student population. In November, the company earned approval from Germany’s Commission for the Protection of Minors in the Media to deploy its age verification services in the country.

Founded in 2011 and headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Trulioo has raised more than $474 million in funding. The company’s most recent fundraising was a Series D investment in June of this year that added $394 million to the firm’s coffers. The round was led by TCV.


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Chime Allows Users to Make Cash Deposits at Walgreens for Free

Chime Allows Users to Make Cash Deposits at Walgreens for Free

Walgreens is in the fintech headlines again. Today, the drugstore chain and challenger bank Chime have partnered to allow Chime customers to deposit cash at Walgreens’ brick-and-mortar locations.

Customers can deposit their cash for free at 8,500+ Walgreens locations. In its announcement, Chime makes the comparison between Walgreens locations and bank branches, mentioning that the new partnership offers more walk-in locations than users have with any bank in the U.S. Also worth noting is the fact that 78% of Americans live within five miles of a Walgreens store.

“We know having access to a physical location for cash deposits is important to our members, and until recently, the options have been limited,” said Chime Co-founder and CEO Chris Britt.

Chime users can make deposits by handing the Walgreens cashier their cash and their Chime debit card. Once the cashier loads the funds into the user’s account, the money is available immediately. Customers are limited to three $1,000 cash deposits each day and $10,000 each month.

Chime’s Walgreens partnership adds to the company’s existing cash deposit capabilities. Customers can also deposit cash at 75,000+ other retail locations including Walmart, CVS, and 7-Eleven, though these stores charge a loading fee of anywhere from $3 to $5. Partnerships with pervasive retailers such as these are key for Chime, since many of the challenger bank’s users receive earnings and tips in cash.

Today’s news comes as Walgreens itself is entering the alternative banking arena. The company announced earlier this year it is partnering with InComm and Mastercard to launch a new bank account offering with a debit card that will pair with a mobile banking app and in-person service at Walgreens locations.

Chime was founded in 2013 and has since risen to the top of challenger banks in the U.S. The company has 20 million customers and boasts a valuation of $25 billion (though the accuracy of that number has been disputed).