Three GAAP profits in a row is the line Chime Financial wants investors to remember. On November 4 the neobank, which trades on the Nasdaq as CHYM, reported third-quarter 2026 revenue of $718 million, up 32% from a year earlier and faster than the 27% growth it posted in the second quarter. Net income came in at $44 million, a 6% net margin.
That streak matters because it answers a question Wall Street has been asking about every consumer fintech that priced an IPO in the last two years: can any of them actually keep the lights on without burning investor cash forever? Chime priced its June 2025 IPO at $27 a share, for a fully diluted valuation of roughly $11.6 billion. It is turning out to be the one with an answer.
Payments revenue, Chime’s core interchange business from debit card swipes, grew 22% to $444 million, or 26% once you fold in Outbound Instant Transfer fees. That’s solid, but it’s not what’s driving the acceleration. Platform revenue, the bucket that includes MyPay (Chime’s earned-wage-access product) and Instant Loans, jumped 52% to $274 million. It now accounts for nearly 40% of total revenue and is growing more than twice as fast as the legacy card business.
Gross margin held at 90%. Transaction profit, Chime’s preferred non-GAAP measure, grew 41% to $530 million for a 74% transaction margin. Average revenue per active member rose 10% to $270.
Member growth is the other half of the story, and it didn’t slow down to get there. Chime added a record 1.8 million net new active members over the trailing twelve months, pushing its base to 10.9 million, up 20% year over year. Purchase volume on Chime cards rose 19% to $38.5 billion, or 22% to $40 billion including instant transfers. Chime raised its full-year outlook on the back of the quarter.
The contrast with Klarna is not subtle
Set this next to what’s happened at Klarna since its own IPO. Klarna priced its New York Stock Exchange listing at $40 a share in September 2025. Instead, the buy-now-pay-later firm swung to a $26 million loss in the fourth quarter and warned growth would slow, according to reporting on its results. The stock has fallen roughly 65% from its IPO price, wiping out close to $10 billion in market value as credit losses rose and the growth story cracked.
Affirm, the other big publicly traded BNPL name, tells a less dire story: it achieved GAAP operating profitability and reported an 8% GAAP operating margin and a 28% adjusted operating margin for the twelve months through its fiscal third quarter of 2026. So the sector isn’t uniformly broken. But Klarna’s wreck is the one investors keep pointing to when they ask whether consumer fintech can scale past venture subsidies into something that actually throws off cash the way a bank does.
Chime’s third consecutive profitable quarter differentiates it from Klarna. Even so, Chime is not free of credit risk. Its MyPay lines of credit and Instant Loans expose it to losses when members fail to repay, and Instant Loans are repaid in fixed monthly instalments. Chime originated $381 million of Instant Loans during the quarter.
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