With its mobile-only, no-fees, customer-centric business model, Chime is the biggest challenger in the mobile banking space. So how does it fuel momentum, support 8 million customers, and keep up in the highly-regulated financial services industry? With a commitment to research and a whole lot of help from SurveyMonkey Enterprise.
A longtime SurveyMonkey user, Chime originally used a mix of individual and team plans to get insights from existing customers, develop product and marketing strategies, and understand how to successfully compete in the market.
As Chime grew, Head of User Research Chuck Liu began fielding more and more internal requests for in-depth data and analysis—and he wanted to streamline how teams collected, shared, and collaborated on data. And as Chime’s scope of research expanded, its data needed to be more organized and centralized to meet compliance and security requirements.
Today, Chime has the resources it needs as it continues to shake up its industry. With SurveyMonkey Enterprise, Chime is able to protect customer data while empowering its employees with critical customer feedback that drives business decisions.
“Financial services is a highly-regulated industry and has a lot of different moving parts. The best way to succeed is by knowing exactly what we’re doing. And that starts with research.”
Chuck Liu, head of user research, Chime
Driving company-wide growth
Chime combines its “research-first culture” with SurveyMonkey insights to understand its customer base, market potential, industry competitors, and opportunities for growth. “Financial services is a highly-regulated industry and has a lot of different moving parts,” explained Liu. “The best way to succeed is by knowing exactly what we’re doing. And that starts with research.”
Chime’s marketing team relies on SurveyMonkey for market research to uncover brand sentiment and evaluate co-marketing and co-branding opportunities—including a major partnership with the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, that was clinched in less than a business day. On the product side, the team focuses on learning what’s top of mind for customers, what’s worrying them about their finances, and what challenges they’re facing.
Across the company, having these reliable insights from SurveyMonkey helps Chime rapidly sift through priorities with an eye for growth. “The executive team, product managers, designers, engineers, all of us get together and use the SurveyMonkey data to set our entire roadmap and strategy,” said Liu.
“We need to be able to scale our organization to hundreds of people, and maintain not only the data quality, but also the data security.”
Chuck Liu, head of user research, Chime
Safeguarding data for long-term success
Cross-functional value is only part of Chime’s approach to data and research—there’s also the matter of security. When Chime upgraded to SurveyMonkey Enterprise, it got access to richer account controls, complex data analytics, and robust compliance and security features. The latter was especially important because any data that Chime collects needs to meet the highly-regulated compliance mandates for financial service providers.
“When it comes to personally identifiable consumer information,” Liu said, “if a financial service company faces a breach, it’s game over.”
With access to single sign-on, PII management, the ability to track all user activity, sentiment analysis, and more, Chime can factor data security into its long-term plans. “We need to be able to scale our organization to hundreds of people, and maintain not only the data quality, but also the data security,” Liu said.
The compliance and security features from SurveyMonkey Enterprise give Liu peace of mind when it comes to ensuring the company is in tune with every mandate. They also bolster Chime’s number one value: being “member-obsessed.”
“We use SurveyMonkey in a way that not only helps us achieve our goals for the team, but also to live them too,” said Liu.
