Chime card is a prepaid/reloadable Visa debit card that’s very similar to Amex Serve/Bluebird. With a Chime card, you get shopping deals for cash back or store credit when you shop at Chime’s partner merchants with no coupons required. The deals have not been very good so far, except for a few rare ones.

Now, starting on February 10, 2016, the Chime Visa Prepaid Card will become a full featured Chime Deposit Account with a Chime Visa Debit Card. The Deposit Account, that will be referred to as the Chime Account, is a demand deposit account available from The Bancorp Bank. 

With the change, there will no longer be a $5.00 Account Maintenance Fee billed to inactive accounts after 180 days. This wasn’t enforced anyway in the past if you had a $0 balance on your Chime card.

Your account will automatically be upgraded to the Chime Deposit Account and Chime Visa Debit Card on February 10, 2016, unless you contact them and request not to be upgraded.

Savings Account

Members have the option to open a linked Chime Savings Account which is an interest bearing savings account with a laughable 0.1% interest. But the Savings account has something interesting.

You can sign up for Automatic Savings and each purchase made with the Chime Visa Debit Card will be rounded up to the nearest whole U.S. dollar. Foreign purchases are rounded up to the nearest whole dollar after the purchase is converted to U.S. dollars . The round up amount (between $0.01 and $0.99) will then be transferred from the member’s Spending Account balance to the member’s Savings Account balance. Plus, every Friday, you’ll get a 10% bonus on your weekly round ups to your Savings Account.

The maximum value of the Round Up Bonuses that may be credited to your Savings Account between January 1 and December 31 each calendar year, is five hundred dollars ($500.00). See terms.

Debit Card Loads Limited to 3 Per Lifetime

One major downgrade is the limit on debit card loads which was useful for required debit card transactions. Deposits made using an external debit card are now limited to 3 times total for the lifetime of the account (HT: DoC).

Chime Rewards

The offers will still be available on your account. Chime Rewards offers all participating Members the ability to receive an automatic credit to the Chime Deposit Account of a specific dollar value at merchants that are listed on your offers. You’ll receive the statement credit within one (1) business day of successful redemption of a Chime Reward.

Here’s the offers currently available in my account

As of now there’s nothing that stands out from the Chime accounts and really not worth signing up. If you already have the Chime card, then it doesn’t hurt to keep it in case there’s any nice offers that come up. You could go for the round up change for $500 a year, but that’s some tedious work.

Chime is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by, and debit card issued by, The Bancorp Bank or Stride Bank, N.A.; Members FDIC.