Jason Lee, Head of Chime Enterprise, on the transformation of employee financial health

Today’s guest is Jason Lee, a fintech veteran who has been at the forefront of employee financial wellness innovation for nearly a decade. After co-founding and scaling DailyPay into one of the pioneering companies in earned wage access, Jason went on to launch Salt Labs, an innovative employee rewards platform that Chime acquired just 18 months after its founding. Now, as the leader of Chime Enterprise, Jason is on a mission to make financial health benefits as ubiquitous in the workplace as health insurance.

In this conversation, we explore why he believes every employer will eventually offer these programs, not out of altruism, but because it makes compelling business sense. Jason shares fascinating insights about how financial stress undermines productivity, why employees value Salt’s non-dollar rewards even more than cash, and his ambitious vision for building an employer-focused financial health platform that could parallel what Fidelity achieved in retirement. It’s a conversation about the intersection of fintech, HR technology, and the future of work – and why the employer may be the most powerful catalyst for improving Americans’ financial lives.

In this podcast you will learn:

• Jason’s high profile background in fintech.
• The origins of Salt Labs and how they became part of Chime.
• The premise for Chime Workplace.
• Why they are fundamentally in the productivity business.
• How they are able to measure financial wellness outcomes.
• Why employers are caring more about the financial health of their employees today.
• Jason’s prediction for employers and financial wellness.
• The target market for Chime Workplace.
• What they hear when they first go into a new employer.
• Why they don’t charge employers for Chime Workplace.
• How their SALT rewards work.
• Jason’s vision for the future of employer-driven financial wellness.

Read a transcription of our conversation below.

FINTECH ONE-ON-ONE PODCAST NO. 564: Jason Lee

Jason Lee:

My prediction is that every employer, as they do now, they have statutory healthcare. They do offer that. That’s virtually every employer, even those who employ white collar people and everyone offers healthcare insurance. My prediction is you will see the same with financial wellness or financial health programs. And the reason simply why, Peter, is because it just makes good business sense. If you were employing hourly workers, you know, right now you’re probably staffed 108, 110 % of what you need, you have 110 people for every 100 seats. And the reason why is because you expect eight to 10 of them to call out sick or to be only 90 % productive. And what is the number one reason for that? It’s because they’re distracted with financial issues.

Peter Renton:

This is the Fintech One-on-One podcast, the show for Fintech enthusiasts looking to better understand the leaders shaping Fintech and banking today. My name is Peter Renton and since 2013, I’ve been conducting in-depth interviews with Fintech founders and banking executives. Today’s guest is someone many of you will know. Jason Lee was the co-founder and CEO of DailyPay, one of the pioneering companies in the earned wage access space.

After exiting that company in 2022, he went on to start Salt Labs, an innovative employee rewards platform. That company was acquired by Chime just 18 months after launch. And now Jason is leading Chime Enterprise, bringing financial wellness products to employees through their employers. In this episode, we discuss why Jason believes every employer will eventually offer financial health benefits just as they do healthcare today.

We dive deep into the Chime workplace offering and how it’s designed to improve employee productivity by reducing financial stress. Jason shares some fascinating insights about the SALT Rewards Program and why employees value these non-dollar rewards even more than cash. We also explore the business model, the integration with payroll systems and Jason’s vision for building an employer focused financial health platform that could rival what Fidelity did with retirement.

Now let’s get on with the show.

Welcome to the podcast, Jason.

JL: Well thanks for having me, Peter, a huge fan.

PR: Thank you very much, you are too kind. Well, let’s kick it off by giving some background about yourself. know long time FinTech listeners will know you’ve had some pretty high profile stops in your career. Let, why don’t you just give us some of the highlights today.

JL: Well, Peter, before I do that, I really do mean this. I mean, I know you get this all the time, but you are probably the MVP. don’t mean minimally viable product. I mean, probably the most valuable podcaster of the industry in the sense that, my goodness, what you’ve been able to do to kind of create critical mass around the work that all of us in the founder community, yourself included, are doing around really trying to bring innovation to our various stakeholders.

Long time coming, of course, but thank you for all the work that you’ve done in that space. I appreciate it.

PR: It’s been a pleasure.

JL: Also, I’m not gonna lie, Peter, I did not know a lot about FinTech when I started. And one of the resources that I just buried myself into was all the content that you and the team were producing at the time. And so I probably owe a lot of the background to you. So a lot of, this is a big echo chamber for you. I mean, on that note, so yeah, so my background here is I did happen to work at an investment bank for several years here in New York. I’m based in New York. I’ve been here my entire professional career. In 2015, I started with a partner of mine, a technology partner of mine, a company called DailyPay.

We started that in my basement and it was myself, him and my dog. And we really kind of delved into this area of earned wage access or on-demand pay. Believe it or not, we had no idea that one or two others were already also experimenting with the concept. But I think a bunch of us probably around the same time, maybe something in the water, something in the air realized it doesn’t make a lot of sense for people to have to wait in order to receive their pay after they fully worked their shift. That really gave birth to an entire new industry, a new area, a bunch of companies. It is remarkable to me that one little idea back in 2015 has created so many different companies also around the world that I work with now across the various international areas where this is now being offered.

I exited that company along with my partner and the founding team to a private equity firm in 2022, so about seven years after we had created the company and founded the company. My venture capital investors and I started another company. It was called Salt Labs and that was launched in 2022. Really the area that we were focused on there, same type of population, meaning lower and moderate income earners. But what we were doing there was, and what we are still doing, was really disrupting what is known as an employee reward in the context of employment. Meaning these are non-cash, non-monetary based rewards that are given out in the employment context, either as a way to improve engagement or improve loyalty by employers. And what we effectively did was we created the very first employee loyalty program modeled after frequent flyer miles. And as you know, frequent flyer miles are this really interesting shadow area of financial technology. Some liken it to a form of stable coin, some liken it to some kind of tokenized value, non-monetary rewards, a really interesting area. And sure enough, what we were able to discover, Peter, was the rewards and the assets that people were earning in connection with our SALT program actually valued these things greater than cash. From there, and we weren’t looking to sell the company, but our friends at Chime noticed a little bit about what we were doing, Chime Financial, noticed what we were up to and said, why don’t we join forces here? And why don’t you come on and maybe help us build an enterprise effort? Chime has done an amazing job over the last 12 to 13 years building a consumer brand and consumer franchise in banking broadly defined.

The idea was could we actually package that and offer that through employers as a financial health benefit? That’s what we’re doing right now. The company was acquired, Salt Labs was about 18 months after we had launched the company. Now we’re all happily here building what we really believe to be the next generation of HR technology, financial technology products.

PR: Okay. So then maybe you could just tease that out for us a little bit. What, what’s the course suite of products look like? mean, what is Chime Workplace? That’s the flagship offering. Yeah. Just tell us a little bit more about it.

JL: Let me start with the premise first, which is, and you will have known this, we’re recording this podcast here in late 2025 for those who might be listening at a different point in time. Everything, if you open the newspaper today or listen to the news or the business press, literally every CEO is talking about employee productivity. Now, some of those conversations are laced with, well, we’re gonna be deploying artificial intelligence and different forms of upgraded technology to improve productivity. But right now, every single employer is thinking about how do I make my employees more productive or my workforce more productive?

By the way, five years ago, that was very different. The discussion five years ago, if you actually were to scan the same articles or the same business press, the big concern was how do I hire enough people? Meaning it was the proverbial rear ends and seats. COVID had just ended and folks were wondering, wait a minute, I need people to man the burger stop or to man the store and no one was available to work. So there’s been a real shift in the labor market. The labor market is actually a lot stronger, but the issue that employees and rather CEOs are facing is how do I make folks more productive? And a lot of that has to do with the deployment of either AGI or different forms of technology.

What we do here at Chime Workplace is I like to call it, we partner with HR professionals to get the employee base in a place where they can actually accept and benefit from some of those productivity measures. Let me say it this way. If you’re coming to work and you are stressed about some big issue you have at home or some debt collector or some credit card company, or you can’t make rent, I guarantee you there is no program in the world, no new training program, no new customer program. None of those efforts are gonna work. If you’re a CEO trying to develop and trying to educate your workforce on how to be a better worker. And so what we tell HR is, look, you guys are the human capital experts. You have to prepare the humans to be in a place where they sensibly can actually pay attention, be engaged, focus on whatever new thing is coming down the pike from your CEO. That’s the business premise, which is we are in the productivity business. We are in the business of getting employees to be able to focus at work on whatever the new initiative is from your company.

Now, how do we do that? For 12 or so years before we got there, what Chime really established its brand on was a couple of core things. Number one, no fee checking, no fee banking, fee-free overdraft, financial education, even things like instant loans or just recently earned wage access for consumers. These are all either very low cost or no cost products that are being offered to employees.

We call that in the HR field, broadly financial wellness. And so what are we doing? We are offering those products with a slight twist, which is, for example, you take earned wage access. We can offer that at no cost through the employer to the employee, just given some of the technology benefits that we get from integrating with employers. But more importantly, we give that data back to the employer. On an anonymized basis, we might be able to tell an employer, hey, look, you may not realize this, but your employees, they are actually saving more. They’re improving their credit score more. Not on an individual basis, of course, but on a workforce level basis. We’re able now to report back to an employer, hey guys, that new program that you rolled out, guess what? People are actually saving $38 more a month. And what we ought to do is actually we ought to run another campaign or do another education session on why it makes sense for your employees to save because now all of a sudden we’ve been able to correlate that data from those people who save more or those who stay longer, take up extra shifts, work harder. They’re more adept to adapting to the new training program that’s coming out. And so it’s really melding together, Peter, what HR cares about, which are these productivity measures with what we know what drives productivity, which is financial health and financial security. That’s really the innovation that we’ve been able to bring.

I’ll make the slight comparison to, for example, my old companies. In my old companies, we only had a very small sliver of visibility into that employee’s life because we only offered, frankly, one product. You know, it’s what we call a point solution. And so the best thing that we can tell an employer was, good news, 44 % of your people are using our product. What we were unable to talk about is outcomes, meaning, hey, 44 % are using it but here’s what they’re now doing in their savings account. At Chime, we have that full visibility. And so now we’re able to kind of partner with employers on, this stuff’s actually working for your employee base.

PR: So then as part of the offering, a sort of a reporting system, obviously you said anonymized, you’re not going to call out any individual, but looking at it saying, here is how the financial health of your employees has changed over the last 12 months, whatever. Is that part of the core offering?

JL: It is. More importantly, we then meld that in with HRAS data, so HR, HCM, human capital management data. Meaning, not only can we say, good news, people are saving more, their credit score is going up, they’re paying their bills on time. We can then cohort that and say, did you realize that actually there’s a strong correlation between those who are doing that and those who are actually staying longer, who are adopting your training programs, who are picking up overtime?

All of that we can now present a holistic bird’s eye view to. We call this our command center. It’s really an ability for someone and for the managers and for the field operatives to be able to say, okay, I know what drives productivity across my workforce and money talks. And for a lot of these folks, they just can’t adopt the newest workplace training program or shifts or whatever you’re trying to do if they’re having problems in their personal financial lives. So that’s really what we’re after.

PR: Yeah, I like that a lot because I’m very bullish on, you know, the employer has such a major role to play in the financial health of its workforce because let’s face it, they provide the incoming, the money for them to live. And so it’s always been surprising to me that they haven’t, this hasn’t been more of an issue. Why do you think it’s happening now?

JL: Number one, I agree, by the way, with what you’re getting at. Perhaps maybe to put a finer point on it, it’s not merely altruism, it’s good business. Let me maybe draw a quick analogy in the United States back to even the days of FDR and the New Deal. Post the New Deal, the very first form of employer-sponsored benefit was actually healthcare. As part of the New Deal, was, hey, can we offer cheaper healthcare by having the employer subsidize in effect economically, but also obviously through group rate because that was a massive group of people who were there. And believe it or not, the very first people or companies to adopt that benefit were the auto manufacturers.

Now, why is that? It’s very, very logical. If you’re on assembly line and the guy in front of you is sick and he’s touching the turbine and passing it to you and then you’re passing it to the next guy, well, that one fellow who was sick but didn’t go to the doctor because he didn’t want to pay the fees or pay the cost of that, well, he could have wiped out the entire assembly line. So what GM and what they realized was it’s better business for us to send that guy to the doctor, to pay for him going to the doctor, than it would be for him to infect the entire assembly line. So it just made business sense to pay that cost, to pay insurance cost because it made good business sense.

Fast forward to where we are today. My prediction is that every employer, as they do now, they have statutory health care. They do offer that. That’s virtually every employer, even those who employ white collar people. it’s not an assembly line anymore. It might be a law firm or a bank. Everyone offers health care insurance, essentially. My prediction is you will see the same with financial wellness or financial health programs. And the reason simply why, Peter, is because it just makes good business sense. If you are employing hourly workers, right now you’re probably staffed 108, 110 % of what you need, meaning you have 110 people for every 100 seats. And the reason why is because you expect eight to 10 of them to call out sick or to be only 90 % productive. And what is the number one reason for that? It’s because they’re distracted with financial issues.

And so the concept here is why now? Well, we are in an affordability crisis right now. And this is not a political statement. This is just a general observation. We’re in a affordability crisis. So this issue is much more acute. And number two, Peter, my thesis is given all of the work that CEOs are trying to implement with artificial intelligence, change management, all of the things to get their businesses in better shape. Well, guess what? They need to get the workforce in a place mentally to be able to accept and to listen and to pay attention and to not be distracted. Otherwise, you’re just gonna roll those things out on deaf ears. And that has been the most compelling thing that we’ve been sharing with CEOs who have really gravitated towards Chime Workplace, which is, yeah, that makes sense. Why would I implement a whole new program if no one’s paying attention. I that is proverbially the trees falling in the forest. And so how do we get people in the right state of mind to be able to accept whatever change management you’re bringing down the road here?

PR: So then who is the target market? you looking at, mean, obviously any company could benefit from this, but are you focused on like Fortune 500? I mean, what type of corporations are you focusing on?

JL: Really anyone who employs what we would call frontline workers, hourly workers, low and modern income earners, that is sort of the target market for those who may need or who would most benefit rather from a technology driven solution to help them save or turn. I’ll give you an example, Peter, of this. I was just on with a client who said, I don’t get it. When I want to save money, I just wire it or I send it via ACH from my Chase account to my Vanguard account. It takes five days to get there, but I’m fine. I said, listen, your employees, number one, they will never do that because it takes five days to get it out. What if they have an emergency? What if they have a flat tire? What if there’s an issue? The technology environment that we have to create for low and modern income earners is one that has no friction. There is none of that friction. You don’t think that’s a cost, but folks in your workforce do. And so we target really any employer who employs hourly or frontline workers.

PR: When did you launch this and what has been some of the early feedback that you’ve received?

JL: So our company, Salt Labs, which was an employee of rewards company, was acquired, or we announced that I guess about 15 months ago, I want to say, about July of 2024. And so we took about six months to integrate our teams, build our products, et cetera. Long story short, we basically came out of stealth, if you can call it that, in the second quarter of this year and of 2025, excuse me, and the response has been really overwhelming. Let me tell you what most people are saying. It’s probably three things. Number one, I know who you are. You’re Chime. And I will say this first. As someone who started two companies from scratch, maybe this is my old age speaking, Peter, but I really appreciate there being a pre-established brand, meaning people know who Chime is. They understand what Chime does. They’ve seen us on television. By goodness, we’re the sponsor of the Dallas Mavericks.

They see us on the Dallas Mavericks uniform. By the way, I had no idea about the trade that occurred, but that’s kind of what we had nothing to do with that. But that’s essentially people know. And the reason why that makes business sense is because imagine you’re an HR director in the field with a thousand locations. The last thing you want to do is have to bring in a vendor who no one’s heard of and have to explain to the workforce and to get their trust. Hey, work with these people with your finances. You see, Chime’s been around for 13 or 14 years, and I really credit the founders of the company for really establishing a well-known brand. And so now when we go in, folks say, gosh, I don’t have to roll that program out. I can just hang up a poster that says, get Chime, and folks will know what that means. So that’s number one, is what we’re hearing is, thank goodness you guys are a brand.

Number two, thank goodness there are no fees. And I will tell you, employers and employees, they are very, very focused right now on every single penny and every single dollar. And look, I will tell you very candidly, I started a company, I started a business, which is the leader in the earn wage access space, where you have to pay to access your pay. And that model was entirely appropriate when we first started the business, because it was a startup industry.

Today at Chime, we offer that at no cost because it’s part of a broader portfolio. Meaning we don’t have to charge you for email anymore, if that makes sense. That’s just something you give. And that’s a little bit of how Chime thinks about, for example, in an isolated context, the earn wage access business, which is, no, you can have that for free when you access this through an employer because we obviously are capturing value in other parts of our supply chain that have nothing to do with the employee, be it merchant interchange and the like. And so that’s been a real benefit. We’ve heard that time and time again is we like the fact that you all quite frankly make money without making it on our employees. And that’s been a real, real benefit.

The third thing that we’ve heard time and time again is please, can we have fewer vendors that do more things? Meaning in this day and age, employers are looking to reduce, get smaller, reduce the number of vendors and they don’t want five financial help, a savings vendor, a credit building vendor, an earned wage access vendor. They want one provider, one partner that offers all of these things to employees. And that’s kind of been one of the value props for Chime is the ability to offer all of those things through one common application.

PR: So then that must mean you’re integrating with payroll and HR systems, that correct?

JL: That’s right. When we work with an employer, we do a fairly light but an important integration with their HRIS or their HCM system.

PR: So you obviously, you know the end-wage access space very well. Chime has the MyPay product, which I think predated your time at Chime. Are you helping out that team just because you have such intimate knowledge of that product?

JL: Yeah, so I think so you’re absolutely right. The great thing about Chime is we’re one team and it’s sort of remarkable and it is it’s very humbling to know that this product that we created is now being distributed across such a broad platform like Chime. Like every product, there are unique things that come up through every single environment. And so yeah, I’ve had the privilege of being able to share a little bit of our expertise and a little bit of our knowledge with them and really co-build the employer product that we are the employer based product that we are now offering through employers to employees, which has a slightly different composition than the one that we offer directly to consumers.

PR: So I think I heard that you’re not actually charging for this product, right, to employers. So this isn’t a SaaS model here. I mean, what is the revenue model?

JL: Currently today, the way in which we make our money through employers is very similar to how we make money through our consumers, which is due to our merchant interchange relationship, every time an employee or what we call a Chime member or a Chime user is utilizing our product at a store, we are obviously earning some form of interchange off of that purchase. And in the same way that an employee might say, you know what, I’d like to use Chime as a way to collect my paycheck, or I’d like to use it for earned wage access or whatever the product might be. Whenever they’re spending off the card, we are actually earning a little bit of a sliver of interchange. And so that enables us to fund or to subsidize any related costs that we might have with integrating with the employer, running our data product, et cetera. And so that’s primarily how we do it. Again, that might change in the future as we offer more products but right now that’s our current business model.

PR: Okay. Okay. So, you know, Salt Labs, you’d launch that and you talked about rewards, employee rewards for helping kind of with retention. Is that part of the product today? I haven’t, I didn’t hear you talk about rewards much as far as the Chime product. Is that, is that existing feature or a future feature?

JL: So, if I may just digress for a few seconds on what the financial health aspect is of employee rewards. This may be very foreign Peter to you or your listeners but when you have nothing in your checking account, you actually look to these other stores of value as being valuable. So, for instance, the way the SALT product works, it’s very much like a frequent flyer mile program. You’re earning this non-dollar currency, which we call SALT, which is redeemable for different experiences or goods or value. That’s kind of the salt product. And you earn it when you work. So every hour you work, you earn one salt. Every mile that you fly, you earn one mile. Very similar concept. Believe it or not, these folks are paycheck to paycheck. They have nothing in your checking account. And they’ve got hundreds of dollars in their salt account that they refuse to redeem. It’s a little bit like, I don’t know if you’re like this, I’m a little bit like this.

I look at my airline miles and I like seeing the balance go up. I’ve actually never redeemed those miles. I’ve got a million plus miles at two different airlines. And for some reason, I kind of like looking at it. I like the balance. I like dreaming. I like dreaming about, you know, maybe one day I’ll take my partner to Hawaii or whatever it might be. And in the same way, that’s how a lot of lower income people think about their salt balances. So again, these are folks who might be paycheck to paycheck, they refuse to redeem their SALT. We ran some fun experiments once where we tried to buy it back from them. We actually ran a bit of a Dutch auction, if you’re familiar with that concept, to find out where the clearing price would be. It’s in the $1 to $1.30 range per salt. Now, if you think about that, it’s almost like they’ve ascribed value to this thing being worth a dollar an hour in terms of what they’re earning. When we work with employers, we tell them, this is a form of latent savings, meaning this is a way that people are saving. It’s hard for them to save their payroll dollars because, you know, unfortunately, dollars go in your account and they go right out. But believe it or not, the non-fungibility of SALT, the non-fungibility of that reward enables them to actually build and accumulate and save because it is immediately not spendable. And so that’s kind of how the narrative fits within the whole Chime workplace experience.

By the way, that is a product that we do charge for, meaning employers fund the redemptions of SALT because obviously that’s what gives it its value. Because you primarily have a fintech audience, I’ll use some technical terms, effectively employer is collateralizing each of the SALT with a nominal amount. So call it 10 cents, they effectively are collateralizing the SALT that gets issued with 10 cents in cash in real value.

And that’s effectively what gives it value. So the employer puts in 10 cents, but the employee views it as being worth a dollar to the plus. And that’s where all the value is being captured. is. It’s probably out of the three things that I’ve done, it’s or four things that I’ve done now, it’s probably my most fun and intellectually stimulating product that I’ve built.

PR: That’s fascinating. That’s really interesting. Right, I totally get it. mean, we chatted, don’t know, it like three, right after you started the company, I think. It was a very, at the time I was thinking, man, that’s just a really creative idea. But like, I wasn’t sure how are you going to get over the hump of bringing it to the mass market? But this is an obvious way to do that, which is really interesting. I hope we get more, I hope it becomes more commonplace because I think, you know, I think we’re on the same page here where I feel like they need to be…employers need to realize the role they play in employees financial health and I think this is a whole part of it. So anyway, so last question then what’s your vision for Chime Enterprise? Where are you taking this?

JL: Well, look, I can only speak for myself, but when I look at some great consumer and enterprise businesses, one of the canonical ones is Fidelity. Fidelity was around since pre-Great Depression. I think it was around since 1911. They kind of bumbled along for 50, 60, 70 years. Some very, very wealthy people bought mutual funds or whatever it was. But some bright soul in some conference room in Boston, had the idea in the 1980s of saying, what if we actually repackaged the classic investment account and we called it a retirement account? And we brought that concept to employers and said, you can, instead of building a, instead of, just paying your employees, you can build for them a future. You can build for them a future. They went, they did not sell financial products or investment products. They sold to the employer a better future.

Well, today, Fidelity has 80 million in the United States customers who have Fidelity accounts. 50 million of the 80 million were introduced to Fidelity through their place of work. Chime has spent the last 12 to 14 years building an amazing consumer brand. think publicly, you can see with the night camera what we’ve said last, very high single digit millions in terms of folks who are using their Chime accounts. But we see the employer opportunity similar to how we saw what Fidelity was able to do. And they were really able to capture a different narrative. You know, Chime when you might see them on television, might be saying, hey, no free checking, great banking, all these great things. Well, we in the employer context might say, hey, become more financially secure. How about a better future? You know, how about these things? And very similar to how Fidelity was saying, go get an investment account versus have a retirement account. And we think that that really enables us to capture a large percentage of the US population that falls within our target market. So that’s really how we think about the future of really bringing these two businesses together.

PR: Okay, we’ll have to leave it there, Jason. Always great to chat with you. Best of luck and thanks for coming on the show today.

JL: Peter, thank you so much again.

PR: One of the things that I have been frustrated about is how fintech has not had enough impact on consumers’ overall financial health. But we may have a way forward here with employer-led financial health programs. I am very bullish on this and agree with Jason that these kinds of programs will become as ubiquitous as health benefits. While it may fall under the guise of helping make employees more productive, but if that means employers take more responsibility for their employees’ financial health, then that can be a win-win. The information on how to live a more financially healthy life has been available now for decades. What people really need are small nudges in the right direction, and employer-sponsored programs can provide just that.

Anyway, that’s it for today’s show. If you enjoy these episodes, please go ahead and subscribe, tell a friend, or leave a review. And thanks so much for listening.