The shockwave in banking
In financial services, the most dangerous place to be isn’t behind a disruptor, it’s assuming you’re still ahead. For decades, traditional institutions established credibility through expansive branches, heritage, and reputation. But today, the battlefield has shifted. Fintech challengers like Chime aren’t just competing; they are resetting expectations and rewriting the rules of engagement.
Kantar’s Blueprint for Brand Growth makes the path forward clear. Growth belongs to the brands that master Salience, Meaningful Difference, and Availability. These aren’t abstract marketing ideals; they are evidence-based levers proven to drive profitable growth across categories. And they are exactly the levers that Chime has pulled, while incumbents have been slower to respond.
Salience: winning the moment of choice
Salience isn’t just about advertising more; it’s about being mentally available when and where decisions are made. Chime has embedded itself into the daily scrolls, swipes, and conversations of its customers. One in three U.S. consumers now says Chime is “gaining in importance.” Branded search volume has climbed 24% from May 2024 to May 2025 (Chimes media spend grew at 6.9%), proving that the brand is showing up at the right moments of choice.
Contrast that with your more traditional banks. Too often, they are seen less from the feeds and communities where financial decisions begin. Financial discovery no longer happens in marble lobbies, it happens on TikTok, YouTube, and Threads. According to Kantar MONITOR, 38.8% of Gen Z learns about money from social platforms. If your brand isn’t top of feed, you won’t be top of mind.
Salience is no longer a media buying exercise. It is a mandate of cultural integration.
Meaningful Difference: from purpose-lagging to purpose-led
Financial institutions love to talk about stability, heritage, and trust. These qualities matter. but they no longer spark loyalty in a generation that expects brands to act on purpose, not just advertise it. Chime operationalizes its mission around financial inclusion: fee-free banking, early paycheck access, and its “Credit Builder” card. These features aren’t slogans; they are proof points that empower underserved consumers. Kantar’s BrandDynamics shows Chime leading all competitors in Difference, while incumbents cluster around sameness.
This isn’t a cosmetic edge. In the Blueprint for Brand Growth, “Different” is what drives predisposition and price resilience. Chime’s purpose is not a press release; it is a growth engine.
By contrast, traditional institutions often sound interchangeable. Promises of “trust” and “heritage” may reassure existing customers but do little to win the next generation. If your purpose still lives in glossy brochures instead of in customer hands, you’re not purpose-led, you’re purpose-lagging.
Availability: killing friction before it kills you
Growth is often lost not to competitors but to friction. Kantar’s data makes it clear: every click, delay, or forced in-branch visit is an open invitation for customers to switch.
Chime’s onboarding process takes less than five minutes. Support is 24/7 and fully digital. The result? Active membership increased 23% year-over-year. That isn’t just acquisition, that’s availability at work.
Meanwhile, many incumbents remain anchored to legacy processes: multi-step verifications, paper forms, branch dependencies. In the digital economy, friction is not a safeguard, it is a growth killer.
Convenience is no longer a differentiator. It is the baseline expectation.
The new trust equation
Trust used to live in physical presence: marble lobbies, vaults, charters. Today, it lives in pixels, UX flows, and kept promises. Chime has earned credibility without branches or a traditional charter, winning younger, more diverse, and often underbanked consumers, the very segments that will fuel growth for the next two decades.
This redefines credibility. Transparency, user-centric design, and fee-free services are the new trust signals. If your brand still relies on geography and heritage as proof of trust, you are building for a world that no longer exists.
Incumbent adaptation: leapfrog, don’t imitate
For legacy banks, the threat isn’t just losing customers to fintech—it’s the permanent elevation of consumer expectations. Mobile onboarding, fee-free services, and seamless UX aren’t disruptive advantages anymore. They are table stakes.
The strategic response isn’t to mimic disruptors. Banks cannot out-Chime Chime. Instead, they must leapfrog:
- Scale + Agility: Pair resource strength with rapid innovation
- Trust Capital + Modern UX: Reframe heritage as a platform for bold, customer-first reinvention
- Purpose + Proof: Turn ESG promises, financial literacy programs, and community investments into tangible customer experiences
The Blueprint is clear: brands that align salience, meaningful difference, and availability, not just in strategy but in execution, are the ones that grow.
The road ahead
The fintech revolution has already moved the goalposts. The consumer has been retrained, expectations rewritten. What used to be disruptive is now the standard. The open question is who will lead in defining what comes next.
For incumbents, this is the last lap before the market locks in its leaders for the next decade. Every month of delay makes catching up harder, costlier, and riskier.
Chime’s trajectory is not an anomaly. It is a warning. It shows how fast a challenger can become the default choice when it masters the Blueprint’s growth drivers.
Kantar’s Blueprint for Brand Growth provides the evidence-based path forward. The question is whether financial institutions will act with urgency, or whether they will be left behind as case studies in complacency.
The clock isn’t ticking. It’s racing. Your move.
