Members

Despite difficulties many lenders lent more in 2024 to affordable housing properties.  Affordable Housing Finance’s Top 25 affordable housing lenders provided $60.1 billion in permanent and construction loans in 2024 to developments that serve households up to 80% of the area median income (AMI). That’s an increase from the more than $55.7 billion in loans provided by 2023’s top lender list.  Citi Community Capital retained its spot at the top of the list. It lent just over $7 billion to affordable housing properties last year, just slightly above the nearly $6.5 billion in 2023.  Because of today’s uncertainties, Citi forecasts it will lend just $6 billion to affordable housing properties this year. However, if federal funding levels stabilize, Citi could easily beat that conservative forecast and build on the amount it lent in 2024, Johnson notes. Citi is also confident that the forecast will not sink lower than $6 billion for 2025. A portion of those loans are conversions of construction loans to permanent financing for projects that have already fixed their sources and uses of funds.  Bank of America Community Development Banking provided a construction loan in mid-2024 and invested in tax credits for the $83.5 million project. Grants, soft financing, and a partially deferred developer fee provided much of the rest of the financing, including a Rhode Island Renewable Energy Grant and funds from the Providence Housing Trust Fund, the Rhode Island Housing Rebounds Fund, and the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston. J.P. Morgan created its Workforce Housing Solutions group to finance projects like this. It closed its first construction loan in December 2023 to finance a new community built with modular housing, now scheduled to open this summer in Los Angeles. In June 2024, Roers Cos., a national multifamily real estate investment firm, closed the financing to develop 200 new apartments at Allers Landing in Austin, Texas. J.P. Morgan provided a $29.2 million construction loan to help build Allers Landing. The $55.9 million project will include 110 workforce housing apartments reserved for households earning up to 80% of the area median income.

Read Article

Last May, U.S. Bank launched its brand campaign, The Power of Us, which highlighted how it supports clients at every stage of their journey to help them reach their goals. Now, U.S. Bank is building on that momentum by launching an extension of last year’s campaign that is focused on how great things can be achieved by working alongside its clients. The new campaign focuses on sharing stories that reflect the diversity of its businesses, reinforce its distinct style of partnership and demonstrate the interconnected nature of its products and services. “This new campaign builds on the strong foundation we laid last year,” said Michael Lacorazza, chief marketing officer for U.S. Bank. “It brings to life the collaborative spirit that defines our brand. By showcasing the range of our businesses and the strength of our partnerships, we’re telling a powerful story about what we can achieve together.” Like last year’s brand campaign, U.S. Bank is putting a spotlight on the brand’s most iconic assets—name, shield, color palette — and continuing to infuse multicultural insights throughout the brand campaign assets. Actor Jake Gyllenhaal also is back as the voice of the campaign spots, adding a distinct tone with subtle gravitas. 

• The Power of Jess: Featuring Jess Sims, an entrepreneur, Peloton Instructor, educator, sideline reporter and game changer, this spot shows how U.S. Bank Smartly® Checking and Savings helps her achieve her goals faster.
• The Power of Mia: This highlights an entrepreneur who uses U.S. Bank Business Essentials® to manage her growing business with ease. 
  Under Control: Mari surprises her dad with a car and explains how Bank Smartly® digital budgeting tools and cash back from her U.S. Bank Smartly™ Checking and Savings helped make it possible. This spot grew from an insight about the daughter’s role as the CFO for her family and was produced as a bilingual commercial that will run in both English- and Spanish-language media. 

Read Article

After much anticipation and speculation, Chime Financial filed the paperwork for its initial public offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission on May 13. While Chime frequently compares itself to banks in its document, it doesn’t accept that label itself — and there isn’t a whiff of the company wanting a charter at any time, even as the Trump administration attitudes on charters appear to be loosening. “Chime is a technology company, not a bank,” according to the document. The fintech partners with FDIC-insured The Bancorp Bank, N.A., and Stride Bank, N.A., as the banking engines behind the growing family of services that Chime provides customers that it refers to as members. Chime considers its key market — at least, up until now — to be American households with annual income of $100,000 or less, which the company says represent 75% of U.S. households. At present the plan is to continue to emphasize that revenue source, which drives Chime’s focus on increasing member usage of its payment cards. The document states that 72% of Chime revenue came from payments in the first quarter (76% for 2024). Most of the rest comes from fees such as for accessing out-of-network ATMs, voluntary tips for its SpotMe fee-free overdraft services, and fees for MyPay instant transfers. MyPay allows members to access up to $500 of their paycheck in advance. Filling its shelves with more products, and drawing in more consumers to use them, is a key part of Chime’s game plan.

• Chime Wants to Expand its Customer Base Beyond Those Earning Less Than $100,000: Chime’s filing paints a picture of a company that has succeeded in reaching a piece of its target audience, people earning under $100,000, many of whom live paycheck-to-paycheck, with a huge amount of growth to go. (We’ll come to those numbers later.) That market is estimated to comprise 196 million people. The company wants to tackle the next demographic layer: the 227 million Americans earning up to $200,000 each year. “Given nearly half of Americans earning more than $100,000 annually are estimated to live paycheck to paycheck, many of these Americans’ financial priorities overlap with those of our current target audience,” the document says. “However, they are also looking for solutions that provide broader access to credit, investing, insurance, and saving on expenses.”
• Chime Hopes to Introduce Additional Products Beyond Its Original Niche: The filing dwells in places on the strength of the company’s technology, especially in accommodating rapid new product development. The company likes to describe its operation as a “flywheel.” This includes mechanisms to drive new membership through member referrals, which it says has been its heaviest driver of signups of active members since 2022. Chime has expanded past the basic accounts it began with, which in general are designed for the paycheck-to-paycheck segment. The filing says that the company wants to introduce additional products, including installment loans, unsecured credit cards, longer-term savings accounts, retirement accounts, investment accounts, wealth management, and insurance.
• Chime’s Growth Drives Membership as Well as Product Use: The company now has 8.6 million “active members.” In March 2025, active Chime members used an average of 3.3 company products. The measurement of average revenue per active member, a number Chime monitors closely, came to $251 in the same period, up from $210 in 2022. As of the end of March, Chime says, 67% of the active members consider Chime to be their primary financial provider. To put that in perspective, in the first quarter, the company says that active members performed an average of 54 transactions a month. Of those, three quarters were making purchases with Chime debit and credit cards. Of those, 70% were for non-discretionary expenses such as food and fuel. Chime believes it has infiltrated its $100,000 and below market by less than 3%, indicating potential for much more growth even if it doesn’t reach for the $200,000 group.
• Chime is Embracing a Hybrid Human/GenAI Approach to Marketing Content: A key part of the company’s approach to digital marketing relies of search engine optimization and targeted paid media. The SEO effort uses the company’s AI-powered Chime Content GPT. The document describes that as GenAI that looks at its most successful blogs, editorial articles and videos. Those form the basis of new content, “in partnership with our internal editorial team and certified financial writers.” “We believe our content generation strategy has put Chime in a strong position compared to traditional banks in organic search results for the key financial categories that resonate most with everyday Americans,” the document says. For those readers who like to see what other players are spending on marketing, Chime spent $519.8 million in 2024 on sales and marketing, up nearly 15% from 2023.

Read Article

Amtrak needed a way to better forecast the company’s cash flow.4 Most cash flow forecasts in the industry rely on a generally accepted accounting principles view of accounting and transactions. However, Amtrak’s treasury team knew that a liquidity-based view would be more effective for its unique situation. “We needed to become a data-driven treasury department,” says Ashmore. “And we recognized that the best source of data was the bank.” While meeting with J.P. Morgan Payments in October 2022, Ashmore requested a forecasting tool and learned that the bank already had such a solution in beta mode.4 Amtrak then implemented the beta solution and provided feedback as J.P. Morgan Payments finished enhancing and building out the tool. Amtrak went live using the Cash Flow Intelligence* tool, which is built into the J.P. Morgan Access® platform, in May 2023. After increasing visibility into its cash flow position, the Amtrak treasury team wanted to further strengthen their financial controls by sharing insights with their colleagues in finance. The company began using the J.P. Morgan Payments SAP plug-in for real-time treasury (SAP RTT) to manage station cash reconciliation as part of an ongoing effort to centralize its treasury management system through SAP implementation.4 Leveraging SAP RTT’s real-time cash position, reporting, reconciliation and real-time payment tracking, Amtrak could track payments end-to-end across the company and enable real-time processing for accounts payable and receivable. Ashmore shared that after working closely with J.P. Morgan Payments, Amtrak implemented the solution with only a few clicks. Doing so meant Amtrak had access to cutting-edge artificial intelligence and machine learning technology without having had to invest significant internal resources. Right away, Amtrak put the Cash Flow Intelligence tool to use to find previously invisible patterns in the company’s cash flow and used the tool to segregate cash flows into categories.4 For example, it separated daily credit card receipts, monthly receipts from state and agency partners, and more infrequent federal receipts throughout the year. Ashmore shared that this significantly increased projection accuracy because the large payments no longer interfered with daily and monthly forecasting. This accuracy helped Amtrak free up balances that they had set aside to cover cash flow issues. By investing these idle balances, Amtrak generated better returns for the company. It also provided an opportunity to receive more grant-based funding for large infrastructure projects. Through its relationship with J.P. Morgan Payments, Amtrak discovered a cash forecasting solution that supported the company’s overall business goals of increasing ridership and maintaining excellence in customer service. With J.P. Morgan’s digital dashboard within SAP, Amtrak can view balances and transactions received from the bank during the day and more precisely manage its overall cash position.4 The company plans to continue pursuing digital evolution and system enhancement as the company expands its routes and improves its services.

Read Article

As a key player in correspondent lending, Chase maintains a complex relationship with independent mortgage banks, and Sean Grzebin CEO of Chase Home Lending Grzebin highlighted how the bank balances those connections. ” We’ll continue to invest in our digital capability so that we can take advantage of our advantage, which is the data. We have relationships with almost half of the customers in the United States, and that relationship gives us a tremendous amount of access into the things that they’re looking to accomplish in their financial lives. Through that, we get a lot of clues about ways that we can help customers on the mortgage side. We’re one of the few that has both amazing digital capabilities, as well as a physical presence, with about 1,300 folks out in branches sitting knee-to-knee with customers every day. We’re always paying attention to macro indicators and how they impact the market, how they impact customer behavior, and how they impact competitor behavior. It’s something that’s unique to 2024, 2025 that the interest rate environment has been really volatile. Sometimes it looks like it’s going to improve and go our way, and then some news comes out and it goes a different way. It is really about positioning for those episodes. I think that the big shift in our strategy is not so much a shift, but more of a focus on when rates drop for some period of time. Whether it’s a day, a week or two weeks, you need to be able to be very quick and responsive to the fact that that happened.  The notional market size isn’t what it used to be. You have a lot of competitors going for even a smaller amount of units. Even though the notional market size looks like it’s kind of getting healthier. It’s still very competitive and very tight. More often than not, we’re getting a shot at the next purchase when the customers in our servicing book. I think that’s healthy and a good trend for us in our business. But again, we continue to look at all of the customers. The reality is anywhere from 700,000 to 1 million Chase customers buy homes every year. The opportunity for us is just very unique because of their otherwise relationship with the bank. I think retention will continue to improve as our capabilities keep evolving. We’re getting more ‘at bats’ than we have historically on the retention customer, is how I would put it. AI is going to be a pretty dramatic change for the industry, and not just at Chase. When you look at it and boil it down, obviously it’s relationships first, but after relationships, the manufacturing process is voice, documents and data. If you want to know what’s ripe for disruption from AI, it’s docs, voice and data. There is going to be a lot of evolution. The jobs are going to change. The relationships are going to matter over time, which plays nicely into our strategy with our customer base and how we’re trying to serve them. When you think about the process in general, it is just very ripe for that, because it’s very rules-based, which AI does better than human beings most times. Ultimately, if the documents can become digitized and it all becomes data, I think it can become very fast for customers, a great customer experience, and very efficient for mortgage companies through time. I think the loan officer’s value is the relationships they have and their ability to talk and manage anxiety through the process as well as present the best deal and the best terms for a customer. The winners in today’s business are the ones that do that more often than they do docs, data and chasing things.  The successful loan officers today have a process whereby they rely on their back office to deliver the actual experience to the customer, and they manage the anxiety, they manage the relationship with a customer, and at the end of that, there’s a winner there.  What you’re going to see with loan officers is not elimination, but the ability to scale way bigger than they’ve ever been able to go. You’re going to see that productivity ramp pretty dramatically. I see a lot of efficiency through the servicing process as well, through AI. In the secondary markets, it’s going to make a difference in terms of speed and execution. Every basis point matters. I think there’s going to be an evolution here that is going to be pretty seismic for the industry, is my prediction. When it comes to just nuts and bolts, we’re using it already in all of our processing. We’ve rolled out a large language model to all 14,000 of the employees that are in the home lending business today, and we’ve been using AI for all of our modeling for years. When it comes to core AI, that’s been in our DNA for several years. The use cases around voice are pretty robust. Particularly if they’re update calls or status calls, those are pretty easy for the machines to handle today. So there are going to be a lot of use cases around voice again, to make everyone more productive, to make the customer service process better.  The machines don’t get fatigued, they can handle most of the actual use cases. It’s going to create scale for anybody that buys into it. We’re not going to be ignorant to anything. We’re going to look at every single thing that can make our process efficient. It’s very difficult to make money in an environment like we’re in right now, markets the way they are.

Read Article