If you closed a Chime checking or savings account since Jan. 1, 2018, and didn’t get your account balance within 14 days, the fintech company may owe you money — up to $150.
Chime customers who closed accounts waited three months or longer to get their refund, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The bureau issued an order that San Francisco-based Chime pay $3.25 million to the CFPB victim’s relief fund as a penalty and at least $1.3 million to affected customers — totaling over $4.5 million.
“Chime’s customers had to wait weeks or months for access to their own money and were forced to use alternative funds to cover their essential expenses,” CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said in a press release.
Here’s what the violation means for you and what one of our CNET Money experts wants you to know.
According to the CFPB, Chime was supposed to automatically refund money from closed checking and savings accounts by check if the remaining balance was more than $1. However, in thousands of instances, Chime failed to refund customers within 14 days and sometimes as long as 90 days.
A Chime spokesperson said that “the majority of the delayed refunds were caused by a configuration error with a third-party vendor during 2020 and 2021.”
Those delays could’ve created a critical financial hardship if someone needed the money in the account to pay for basic living expenses like groceries and housing, the CFPB noted. For some folks, the only alternative might’ve been to rely on payday loans or to carry a credit card balance, both of which can involve exorbitantly high interest rates.
If you had a balance less than or equal to $10 and you didn’t receive your refund within 14 days of closing the account, Chime will refund you $25. If you had a balance of more than $10, your refund will be calculated at a 30% annual rate for the time between your refund’s due date and the day you actually received your refund, or $150.
Chime has 10 days to set up a $1.3 million fund for issuing the refunds. You should expect to receive a letter in the mail from Chime if you qualify.
If you’ve moved since closing your Chime checking or savings account and believe you qualify for a payout, it’s best to update your mailing address by contacting Chime’s customer service at 844-244-6363. Within the next seven days, the company is required to publish a telephone number, email and postal addresses specifically to field questions regarding the refund.
It’s worth noting that Chime isn’t a bank; instead, it partners with other banks to offer its products and services. However, its accounts are held by one of two partner banks covered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
“To mediate risk like the one that has occurred with Chime, I would definitely advise people to consider having emergency savings at a separate bank from where they do their day-to-day banking,” said Bola Sokunbi, a Certified Financial Education Instructor and member of CNET Money’s Expert Review Board.
You may also consider having some money on a preloaded or prepaid card to have access to funds in case of a banking mishap or emergency, she added.
If you haven’t already started saving for the unforeseen, try to start now. Sokunbi recommends creating a line item in your budget to put money toward savings each time you get paid. “Ideally, you want to aim to save at least three to six months of your core or essential living expenses,” she said. That should include housing, transportation, core utilities and medication for you and your household.
Even saving a small amount can help bridge the gap if there’s a temporary issue with your current bank. To be on the safe side, consider keeping this money at a separate high-yield savings account that lets you earn interest and offers easy access to your money.
MOUNT VERNON, Ill. — The Mount Vernon Township High School finance committee and school board will meet Monday, June 24. The finance committee will meet at 5:30 p.m. and the board will meet at 6 p.m.
The finance committee meeting agenda is as follows:
Mt. Vernon Township High School
FINANCE COMMITTEE MEETING
Monday, June 24, 2024
5:30 p.m.
The agenda for the board meeting is attached:
The FBI is investigating the financial dealings of Vance County’s former finance director. County manager Renee Perry confirmed the investigation to WRAL.
Katherine Bigelow was terminated in February after Perry said she misrepresented her qualifications as a CPA, or certified public accountant.
A financial audit found that Bigelow wired more than one million dollars of county funds to a company that she was affiliated with.
“The County also failed to comply with G.S. 159-28(b), which requires at least two signatures on all checks or drafts issued by a government, one being the Finance Officer or properly designated Deputy Finance Officer, and the other by another official of the local government designated for that responsibility by the governing board,” the audit reads.
The report also details several other issues, including overspending, insufficient training and lack of oversight.
“This action was able to go undetected for the time that it did due to a lack of understanding by the staff of the County in their assigned duties, and no cross-training of individuals who would have been able to provide oversight on the transactions,” according to the audit.
The audit findings were presented to the Board of Commissioners June 3 by Thompson Price Scott Adams and company.
“We finally started digging into why we weren’t getting the numbers we wanted…and the timeliness of the numbers…and the accuracy of the numbers. We began to dig into why weren’t the numbers reconciled, why weren’t they timely…which led to our discovery,” the auditor said during the meeting. “Our folks started going, ‘The answers she’s giving us are not what somebody in her position should be giving us.’”
In February, WRAL asked Perry if there have been any inconsistencies with the county’s budget, given Bigelow’s removal. Perry said there were no inconsistencies with the budget at the time.
During the June 3 meeting, the auditor said he brought those concerns to the previous county manager. Perry and other commissioners pressed him during the meeting, saying he should have relayed those concerns to her when she assumed her position in November 2023.
“We should have contacted Ms. Renee; I’m not disputing that,” the auditor said. “When she came on board, by the end of November, we should have said we need to have a conversation… Maybe I was just totally focused on getting data and not contacting management, which I will assume that responsibility.”
Another commissioner questioned the auditor about their responsibility to identify the financial issues sooner.
“Y’all been doing this since 2019, and y’all are just finding this now for 2023. Do y’all hold yourself any account for what’s going on?” they asked.
“Internally, we have done some looking. We think we did everything correctly. It’s unfortunate, but the reality is, a financial audit is not traditionally designed to pick up fraud,” the auditor said.
WRAL asked how the county is making changes to prevent a similar occurrence.
“To prevent in the future, we have internal controls in place that allow for dual signature on wire transactions. We are also working on an overhaul of our financial policies and procedures,” Perry responded via email.
The county has 60 days to provide a plan to fix the issues presented in the audit.
Bigelow previously served as the finance director since 2019. Perry also said Bigelow has died. The cause of death is unclear.
The central banks of seven Pacific island nations have signed a roadmap that commits them to working together to boost inclusive green finance (IGF) in a region highly vulnerable to climate change.
The Natadola roadmap, named after the beach resort where it was signed, was agreed by the central banks of hosts Fiji as well as Papua New Guinea, Samoa, the Seychelles, the Solomon Islands, Tonga and Vanuatu.
The document identifies regional capacity building in green finance as a priority and encourages the pooling of funding and technical expertise between countries, as well as the leveraging of technological solutions by the financial sector.
It also emphasises the need for a just transition to net zero that recognises different states’ capacity to implement policy solutions, as well as the existence of diverse needs within populations and between countries.
“These Pacific Island nations are leading the way in implementing groundbreaking IGF policies. Countries such as Fiji and Vanuatu have included disaster resilience into their regulatory frameworks,” the roadmap says.
“The Reserve Bank of Fiji has made significant strides by including green elements into surveys that assess the demand for financial services. This enabled them to comprehend the susceptibility of households and their strategies for dealing with natural catastrophes.”
The roadmap further highlights the Central Bank of Papua New Guinea’s “groundbreaking Inclusive Green Finance Policy, the first in the region, [which] includes a green taxonomy that resonates an inclusive approach to green financing wherein micro, small, and medium enterprises… are considered”.
The roadmap was signed under the auspices of the Pacific Islands Regional Initiative (PIRI) Plus, which is part of the Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI), at the end of a four-day conference in Natadola that also included representatives of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand and the central banks of the Maldives and Bahamas.
The document is intended as an attempt to build on the 2017 Sharm El Sheikh Accord on green finance, which promotes a financially inclusive response to climate change in developing countries.
PIRI chair Ariff Ali, the governor of the Reserve Bank of Fiji, “emphasised that central banks play a critical role in addressing climate risk challenges, an issue acknowledged as one of the most pressing at our Pacific doorstep”, according to a statement released by the central bank.
“He underscored that central banks’ traditional mandates of price stability and financial stability are intrinsically tied to the health of our planet and that by integrating environmental considerations into macroeconomic frameworks, central banks can incentivise investments in renewable energy, sustainable infrastructure, and climate-resilient technologies.”
The AFI’s policy programmes director Eliki Boletawa meanwhile pointed to the devastating recent landslide in Papua New Guinea, which the prime minister has linked to changing weather patterns, as a sign of the urgency with which the region needs to “enhance our resilience against environmental shocks and emergencies”.
Low-lying Pacific island countries are considered extremely vulnerable to rising sea levels, with most of their populations living close to the shore.
The islands contribute less than 0.02% of global greenhouse gas emissions, but with cyclones and other extreme weather events rising in frequency and intensity, the cost of such disasters and local climate adaptation efforts has ballooned.
The Agence Française de Développement aid agency estimates that the annual cost of climate damage in the Pacific island nations stands at around 10% of their GDP, or US$1bn per year.
This page was last updated June 21, 2024
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