"I believe what takes finance leaders from 'good' to 'great' are—counterintuitively—their non-financial skills," says Matt Newcomb, Chime's CFO. "Good finance leaders create strong analysis; great finance leaders use strong analysis to develop sound business strategy, improve operational performance, and drive commercial outcomes."
When Matt joined Chime, he wasn't thinking about becoming a CFO. "I joined Chime as a business generalist. I'm not a CPA, I wasn't an investment banker—I'm not even traditionally trained in FP&A," he says. "But I did have depth in analytics, capital markets, and business development in roles that required combining rigorous quantitative analysis with persuasive communication." He's leaned on this combination of skills and experience time and again in his role as CFO at Chime, be that through making sure we make member-centric, high-ROI business decisions, negotiating many of our commercial partnerships, or using data to articulate Chime's story.
Matt also uses his philosophy on what makes a great finance leader to lead his team at Chime: "I encourage my team to obsess about knowing our business inside and out, and to be able to speak about it at multiple altitudes—it's about connecting business metrics to member experience, linking financial performance to product decisions, and driving business decisions that support our long term company vision," he says.
At Chime, we get to see Matt in action—in meetings, at all hands, and in the hallways. One thing he does better than anyone we know is explain deeply technical and quantitative details behind Chime to tell a story—a measure he also holds his entire team to. We wanted to hear more about his journey to Chime and the work his team does, so we sat down with him—here's what we walked away with.
Matt's Career Journey
"To be honest, I kind of fell into a career in finance," Matt says of his career journey. As a liberal arts major, he spent his college years writing long papers—and not doing much math. But when he joined BlackRock in a quantitative role, he realized that finance was where he wanted to be. "I discovered I loved working with data and using insights from data to make sense of the world."
"And it turned out the world needed a lot of sense-making at that time." Matt joined BlackRock in 2008, at the onset of the Great Recession. After a few years helping build BlackRock's fintech platform, he joined the firm's Financial Markets Advisory practice—a special situations group that advised large financial institutions, central banks, and governments on complex capital markets issues—where he got a taste of the client service, strategy, and business development side of things, too.
"These early career experiences have played a critical role in how I've built teams and my career since," he says. "Nowadays, when I'm hiring and growing teams, I look for people who are analytically savvy and detail-oriented, but who can also communicate clearly and effectively, and 'see the forest for the trees.'"
After BlackRock, Matt attended business school and founded an EdTech startup. Through his studies—and experience in the world of finance—he became interested in several themes in consumer fintech, including the strategy of developing primary consumer financial relationships in retail banking. This interest led him to Chime's founders and, well, the rest is history. Matt joined Chime in 2016.
On joining Chime
"What got me so excited about Chime was the authenticity of our mission and the ability to make a big impact on the lives of our members," Matt says. "In contrast to an industry that remains addicted to punitive fees, Chime sets itself apart with a business model that is deeply aligned with our members' success—allowing us to be authentically focused on our mission of uniting everyday people to Unlock Financial Progress™."
Chime has had to do two things to make our mission-aligned model work. First, we've built a unique, end-to-end technology platform that's enabled cost, speed, and flexibility advantages relative to incumbents. "Our platform allows us to serve our members with truly innovative products at a low cost," Matt says.
Second, we've been laser-focused on earning the right to serve our members in a primary financial account capacity, which leads to deeply engaged, long-lasting relationships with our members. It also gives us a top-of-wallet card relationship. "Fundamentally, we are successful when we earn our members' trust," explains Matt. "Our primary account relationships also provide an extremely rich proprietary data set that we can use to improve our products in ways that others just can't, creating the best possible banking experience for our members—over and over again."
"It's a powerful wave to ride when mission and business align; it provides a decision-making framework that scales and helps us deliver real value for our members and build our company at the same time," Matt says. "But trust is hard to earn and easy to lose—that's why we obsess every day about getting the details right."
