Building a Financial Company

When Stripe launched publicly on 29 September 2011, accepting a card payment online usually meant applying to an acquiring bank for a merchant account, buying a separate gateway, filling in weeks of underwriting forms and carrying the burden of card-security compliance. Patrick and John Collison, brothers from County Tipperary who had sold their first start-up in 2008, made it a developer product: paste a few lines of code and charge a card within minutes, at a flat 2.9% plus 30 cents, with Stripe acting as the master merchant and absorbing the bank relationships and compliance behind its software. Stripe is not a bank. It holds state money-transmitter licences and relies on partner banks for acquiring, card issuing, lending and treasury accounts. Businesses on Stripe processed about $1.9 trillion in 2025. It cut about 14% of its staff in November 2022, and its valuation went from about $95 billion in 2021 to about $50 billion in 2023 and then to about $159 billion in February 2026, while it stayed private. In June 2025 Georgia approved a limited-purpose bank charter that lets it join the card networks directly as an acquirer (state bulletin, reported).

Chime, founded in San Francisco in 2012 by Chris Britt and Ryan King and launched in April 2014, built consumer banking the same way: it owns the brand, the app and the customer, while two small partner banks hold the deposits and carry formal responsibility for compliance (Chapter 13 explains the economics). Building the company took longer than building the product. Chime lost money for most of its first decade, about $203 million in 2023 and about $25 million in 2024 (S-1); it delayed a planned IPO and cut staff in 2022; and it listed on Nasdaq in June 2025 at $27 a share, less than half the roughly $25 billion private valuation of 2021. It reached 9.5 million active members and about $2.2 billion of revenue in 2025 and earned its first GAAP profit in the first quarter of 2026. In September 2026 it agreed to buy one of its partner banks, to own the charter beneath its product (pending approval).

Neither company won by having a better app alone. Each built a product on someone else's licence, then spent years building the controls, licences and capital to own more of it. This chapter covers what founders of financial companies must build besides the product.