On July 14, Chime® hosted its first Financial Progress Forum in San Francisco, bringing together our entire product team, executives, and leading financial experts from the Financial Health Network, FinRegLab, SaverLife, and Commonwealth. Panelists and participants were guided by a single question: How do you know whether a financial product is actually moving members forward?
It was a working session — not a conference — designed to educate on and pressure-test frameworks for measuring financial progress alongside the experts who helped build them.
Financial Health Becomes a Product Metric, Not Just a Mission Line
Chime's mission from the start has been to unite Americans to unlock their financial progress. To deliver on it, our understanding of what financial progress looks like in practice and how our product suite furthers it is key. That means evaluating products based on how and how much they help members make real financial progress, not just by how much they use them.
Chime has spent years building its own internal model for measuring that kind of impact — doing so requires a deep understanding and agreement on what financial health is, the right economic techniques to measure it with rigor, as well as the willingness to apply what we learn to improve our products over time. The Forum marked a leap forward: a chance to refine our approach in a room with some of the country's foremost experts on financial health and pressure-test it against industry-leading measurement frameworks
"We all come to work every day to help our members unlock financial progress," said Jennifer Kuperman, Chime's Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, in her opening remarks. "The important thing we're talking about today is: how do we actually operationalize that thinking and measure the progress we help our members make?"
Chime's own research offers a starting point: 91% of members report experiencing financial progress since joining Chime1. But as Ivo Parashkevov, VP of Product Management at Chime, noted during the opening fireside chat, that figure is "a good headline, not very nuanced or actionable." It doesn't identify which products drove the improvement, which dimension of financial health they touched, or why they worked for the member. Recognizing the gap between directional confidence and product-level evidence — and the opportunity to better understand it — was the throughline of the day.
Chime Leadership Meets Four Research Partners
Chime's attendees included co-founder and interim CPO Ryan King, CTO Jeff Currier, and members of the company's senior leadership and product teams.
The external research partners included:
Jennifer Tescher, Founder and CEO, as well as Beth Brockland and Carly Perera of the Financial Health Network, whose FinHealth Standard is among the most widely used measures of financial health in the industry
Melissa Koide, CEO and Director of FinRegLab, whose research on cash-flow underwriting and data-driven credit models has shaped policy conversations in Washington
Mariel Beasley, Head of Product & Insights at SaverLife, whose platform serves over 800,000 members — many of whom bank with Chime
Charvi Gandotra of Commonwealth, who joined the afternoon working session and provided insights on savings and investing, including for employer-sponsored programs and accounts
What the Day Surfaced: Measurement, the 'Coping' Majority, and AI's New Urgency
The morning opened with a fireside conversation moderated by Danny Friel, Chime's Lead Economist, and Ivo Parashkevov, VP of Product Management. Three themes stood out.
The science of measuring financial health is real — and consequential.
"What gets measured gets managed," said Tescher. "The measurement isn't just for the heck of it — it's so you can manage the products, experiences, and practices you're delivering every day, so they deliver on the promise you've made to customers and on your bottom line."
Most Americans are coping, not thriving.
Tescher shared that only roughly a third of U.S. households are financially healthy by FHN's measure, half are "coping," while the rest are financially vulnerable. This distribution that has held steady for a decade, excluding the pandemic. Roughly a quarter of households move up or down a tier in any given year, typically triggered by a discrete event: a job loss, a medical bill, an inheritance. Such volatility, panelists agreed, is where Chime has the most opportunity to understand the impact of its products and services.
Real financial lives resist tidy narratives — and AI raises the stakes on getting the measurement right.
Beasley described SaverLife's member base as navigating financial lives that are "very individualized,” closer to "an octopus with a ton of tentacles" than a straight path from crisis to stability.
And as AI-powered financial agents move from offering advice to potentially acting on a consumer's behalf, the industry needs sharper, faster ground truth about what's actually helping people — not just softer signals like satisfaction or engagement, Koide added.
A Shared Vocabulary for Chime, a Stress-Test for the Frameworks
Chime and its research partners each left with something concrete: for Chime, a sharper, evidence-backed vocabulary for prioritizing its product roadmap, and a working relationship with the researchers best positioned to stress-test it. For the research partners, a closer view into how their frameworks perform against the transaction-level reality of a fintech serving millions of mainstream Americans.
"This was years and years of work and relationship-building," Kuperman said. Parashkevov closed the fireside on a similar note: "For all of us, this conversation will continue for a long time. This is just the beginning."
