Seguro de depósitos FDIC hasta 250.000 $ por depositante por banco asegurado y por categoría de propiedad. Para bancos con licencia, la cobertura es directa. Para fintechs que operan bajo modelo de banco socio (BaaS), la cobertura es "pass-through" (por transparencia) y aplica en el banco socio, no en la fintech.
Importante. Este producto se ofrece mediante un modelo de banco socio (BaaS). Los depósitos de clientes se mantienen en The Bancorp Bank, N.A. and Stride Bank, N.A., asegurados por FDIC hasta 250.000 $ por depositante en modalidad pass-through. La propia fintech NO es un banco con licencia y NO está asegurada por FDIC de forma separada — verifique el certificado FDIC del banco socio mediante BankFind antes de confiar en la cobertura.
Fuente primaria: https://banks.data.fdic.gov/bankfind-suite/bankfind
A fintech, not a bank
Chime Financial, Inc. is not a chartered bank. It is a financial technology company that operates a consumer banking experience on top of two FDIC-insured partner banks: The Bancorp Bank, N.A. and Stride Bank, N.A.. This is the standard US BaaS arrangement.
The partner-bank model
When you open a Chime Spending Account, the deposit relationship is between you and either Bancorp or Stride — not Chime. Chime's role is the user experience layer (app, card, customer service, fraud monitoring); the partner bank holds the funds, carries the FDIC charter, and is the legal counterparty for your deposit. Chime's terms make this disclosure explicit; the FDIC certificates for both partners are searchable in the FDIC's BankFind Suite.
FDIC pass-through and aggregation
FDIC pass-through coverage requires three conditions: (a) the partner bank is FDIC-insured, (b) account records identify the individual depositor, and (c) the funds sit in a custodial account that meets FDIC pass-through rules. All three apply at Chime as of editorial verification on 2026-04-29.
The aggregation rule is the part most readers miss: the $250,000 ceiling is per depositor per partner bank, not per fintech. If you hold balances at multiple BaaS fintechs that share Bancorp or Stride as their sponsor (and many do), your $250,000 limit aggregates across all of them. Verify your sponsor bank exposure before treating two fintech apps as "two separate $250k buckets."
Operational track record
Two material incidents are worth knowing. In October 2023, an outage caused by a third-party processor disruption left some Chime customers unable to access funds for several hours; deposits were never at risk, but the dependency on sponsor-bank infrastructure was the headline. In 2024, the CFPB settled with Chime over delays in returning closed-account balances within Reg E timelines. Neither event affected FDIC coverage; both reflect the operational-fragility tradeoff of a multi-party stack.
Verdict
Chime is safe in the FDIC sense — your deposits sit at FDIC-insured partner banks and are covered to $250,000 per partner. The structural caveats are real but bounded: aggregation across shared sponsors, an extra operational link in the chain, and customer-service handoffs between fintech and bank. For a fee-free everyday checking account at the headline ceiling, Chime is a reasonable choice; for balances approaching $250k, treat the aggregation rule as load-bearing.
La cobertura FDIC por transparencia (pass-through) se aplica por banco socio, no por fintech. Si mantiene fondos en varias fintechs tipo Chime que comparten el mismo banco socio, su límite FDIC de 250.000 $ se agrega entre esos saldos. Las tenencias cripto, el efectivo de corretaje a la espera de inversión y las líneas de protección por sobregiro NO están aseguradas por la FDIC — verifique el tipo de producto antes de asumir cobertura. Reg E otorga derechos de responsabilidad limitada por transferencias electrónicas no autorizadas notificadas dentro del plazo legal.