Investing has long carried an unspoken entry fee: enough spare cash to matter, enough time to learn the market, and often enough money to pay somebody else to handle it. Chime's newest product is built on the premise that none of those should be prerequisites.

The company has rolled out Chime Invest, bringing stock and ETF trading and expert-designed portfolios directly into its main app. Members can trade without commissions or hand the work to a managed portfolio, and neither route carries a minimum balance requirement. The effect is to place investing on the same screen where users already earn, spend and save.

Built for people the market has skipped

The product is aimed squarely at the large share of Americans who hold no equities at all — a group Chime argues has been priced and intimidated out of the single most dependable long-term wealth-building tool available to ordinary households.

Polling from April 2026 put the share of Americans owning no stock at roughly 40%. Chime's own research pointed to a familiar cluster of reasons: no time to learn how markets behave, more urgent financial priorities competing for the same money, and the expense of professional advice.

The response is a deliberately low bar. Members can start with as little as US$1, and for anyone short on time or confidence, the managed option removes the need to make decisions at all.

Starting and staying consistent is the hard part — so put investing where people already keep their money. — The premise behind Chime Invest

Chief executive and co-founder Chris Britt framed the launch around that friction, noting that millions of people already trust the company with their day-to-day finances and that folding investing into a familiar app is what turns saving into investing, and investing into long-term wealth.

Two paths inside one app

Rather than building a separate investing interface, Chime embedded the feature into the existing app and split it into two clear routes depending on how much control a member wants.

The decision leans on unusually heavy engagement: members open the app around five times a day and complete more than 50 transactions in a typical month. That habit is the distribution advantage, and a standalone app would have thrown it away.

For hands-off users, Managed Portfolios offer diversified allocations matched to individual goals and risk appetite, run by Atomic Invest, an SEC-registered investment adviser, with no minimum balance. Pricing follows membership tier: nothing for Chime Prime members, 0.10% a year for Chime Plus, and 0.25% for everyone else.

For members who prefer to pick their own holdings, self-directed investing opens up a broad range of US stocks and ETFs on a commission-free basis, with SIPC protection covering up to US$500,000. The feature is being released to members in stages over the coming weeks.

Launching into a strong financial year

The timing is not incidental. Chime Invest arrives just ahead of second-quarter results due in August, following a first quarter the company characterised as a strong opening to the year.

First-quarter revenue came in at US$647m, a 25% year-on-year rise helped along by seasonal tax refund flows. Guidance for the second quarter sits between US$633m and US$634m, with full-year revenue projected at US$2.66bn to US$2.69bn — annual growth of 22% to 23%.

Alongside 10.2 million active members, third-party research from May 2026 found that more Americans opened accounts with Chime than with any other financial institution over the period. Layering an investing product onto that base is a bid to deepen revenue per member without paying again for acquisition.