Chimers Chime In: Q&A with Nic Cadwallader, Chime’s VP of Member Experience

“As someone who grew up below the poverty line and raised by a single mother who immigrated to this country, Chime’s mission to enable everyone to achieve financial peace of mind really spoke to me.

Out of necessity, I had to manage my mother’s banking and finances at an incredibly young age and experienced a system that was jargon-laden, unnecessarily confusing, and at times purposely opaque.

I love working with an incredibly talented and passionate group of people to remove these obstacles and create an experience that guides customers to build the types of behaviors and habits to unlock access to financial products they need to achieve financial prosperity.”

— Nic Cadwallader, VP of Member Experience at Chime

We sat down with Nic Cadwallader to learn more about her career experience and the work she does at Chime as our VP of Member Experience.

You started your career in the healthcare industry — why did you decide to follow that path?

I was driven to pursue a career in the healthcare sector because I grew up without access to healthcare. My mother emigrated to the U.S., and English was our second language. As a single mother, she lacked access to two main systems: healthcare and financial services. Through our experiences, I learned how critical health and financial prosperity are to achieving success. I helped my mother navigate the banking system, managed our cash flow, got her access to credit, and helped her take out loans. On the healthcare side, she never had jobs that offered healthcare, so I had to understand the implications of our situation for when we visited doctors — and help manage the financial side of healthcare on the backend.

When I started my studies, the thought of pursuing anything related to financial services was really intimidating, but healthcare felt more approachable. After all, doctors and nurses are there to help someone get better, so my experience in that space had been positive.

How did you get introduced to the financial services industry, and why did you decide to shift your career from healthcare to financial services?

I went to work overseas in healthcare and realized how different the healthcare landscape is outside of the U.S.. During that time, I worked on several projects focused on delivering better experiences for customers and got introduced to the financial services sector, and it dawned on me how impactful work in the industry could be.

I realized how much power financial institutions have to either accelerate someone’s ability to achieve their goals — like getting an education, buying a house, or retiring — or slow them from doing so. From my experience, I knew how complex a system it is to navigate and how inaccessible it can sometimes feel. I decided to join a bank, where I worked on the strategy side.

How did you get into customer-focused roles?

I had my first foray into the tech industry when I joined Intuit, a company that lives and breathes its customers. I loved being part of an organization fully focused on its customers — even in internal-facing roles, there was a significant emphasis on serving the customer, which might be a fellow employee. Working at Intuit strongly informed how I think about customers and how I’ve approached my roles since then.

After that, I joined Affirm, an early-stage fintech startup, in 2016, focusing on lending for people lacking credit. In my work there, I saw again how important the customer is to a company. And in my most recent role at e-commerce company Rothy’s, I saw how much the company had to over-index on customer outcomes, benefits, and experience. I learned many lessons watching how responsive e-commerce must be to customers to survive, as well as how wonderful it is to work in an environment where your customers are obsessed with your company — it makes the work more rewarding, challenging, and impactful.

Why did you join Chime?

I joined Chime because of my personal beliefs in making financial services more accessible and because the challenges Chime is solving are interesting and exciting. I love that Chime takes a member-first, intentional approach to the high-impact financial services industry by constantly gathering and integrating member feedback to move at the pace our members expect us to. If I had had access to a product like Chime while helping my mother navigate our finances, my experience would have been very different.

Why are members so important to Chime? Why do they matter to you?

Over time, I’ve realized how critical customers are to a brand, company, or product — you just can’t have a product without customers. In the traditional financial services industry, it’s become the norm that customers need banks more than banks need them. I believe that Chime is in such an important position because we’re helping to even the playing field between consumers and the brands they choose to interact with — by being a brand that our members want to interact with daily. The overall dynamic of the industry has shifted in favor of our members, and as they reflect their experiences to us, we have no choice but to listen to them.

Because technology is helping democratize access to financial products and services that have been closed off for decades, we must listen to the people who want and need that access — our members — to continue existing as a company. Being as close to our member base as possible is at the heart of our long-term success because they have so much potential to drive innovation and ensure we’re being thoughtful about what we create and meeting their needs. Our members are the people who will give us great ideas or tell us when something isn’t working. We talk about being member obsessed, and we are — and one of our goals is to build a Chime they are as obsessed with as we are with them.

Three months in, how are things going? What has surprised you the most?

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much Chime invests in our people and operating structure. I’m impressed by the company’s focus, that we’re always ensuring we’re doing things to enhance the member experience. I’ve seen how Chime has set a strong foundation so that moving forward, we can optimize everything we’re going to do for the benefit of our members.

I love how intersectional the member experience is at Chime — how people work across functions, like product and risk, to address pain points or make our vision for members come to life. I’m excited to keep supporting my team and feeding the member experience to cross-functional partners so as they’re tackling their own challenges, they can weave in our members’ voices.

What are you most looking forward to?

Long term, I’m looking forward to reimagining what member experience actually means. I can’t wait for Chime to become a leader not just in financial services, but across any sector.

Today, many members contact member support, get an answer, and walk away. I hope we can create a world where all the information our members need is at their fingertips and when they contact us, we’re adding tremendous value to help them navigate everything Chime offers, continuing to move away from the transactional nature of member support towards a more relational way of supporting our members.

When I think of an ideal version of the member experience, I think back to the kind of service I would have wanted growing up and helping manage my family’s finances. Such reflection gets me thinking about what our members want to learn about, explore, and how they want to grow their finances and their skills.