How Current’s Shift from User Acquisition to Capital Efficiency Is Reshaping Neobank Growth

Current has built a consumer fintech growth engine by starting with prepaid and simple banking features, then expanding into broader banking services to deepen engagement and raise lifetime value.
Its revenue model is shifting toward more diversified, recurring fee and subscription income, mirroring scaled neobanks that rely on payments, interchange, and value-added financial services.
Current faces intense competition from larger neobanks and incumbents, making retention, monetization, partnerships, and regulatory capital access critical to its strategy.
Key uncertainties include its exact revenue mix, capital position, resilience of its customer base in a tougher macro and regulatory environment, and the path to sustainable profitability.

How Current builds its growth engine: While the primary article from Axios—”How Current’s long game built a consumer fintech growth engine”—provides the qualitative framework, additional public data suggests that Current (a fintech neobank) started with a prepaid-charged client base, low acquisition costs, and strong engagement tools like early direct-deposit access, budgeting tools, and child/dependent spending oversight. Through this, it not only attracted users but also got them to expand usage across more banking services (e.g. checking, savings, overdraft), enabling cross-sells and increasing lifetime value. [1]

Revenue, capital structure, and product mix: Neobanks generally generate income from a mix of interchange fees, subscriptions, overdrafts or non-sufficient funds fees, interest income, and late-stage extensions like investing, lending, and financial wellness tools. In contrast, firms hitting scale are generating more fee-based or subscription-based revenue—Current’s model likely converges with this. Supporting data: the U.S. fintech market shows that payment firms account for a large share of global fintech revenue (~$126B of ~$378B in 2024) and are considered “indisputable winners” because of the defensibility and recurring nature of interchange and payments flow. [2]

Competitive and strategic landscape: Current competes with incumbents (traditional banks expanding digital offerings) and well-capitalized challengers like Chime, SoFi, Revolut. For example, Chime increased active members 21% YoY (to 9.1M) while growing revenue by 29% in Q3 2025, and is guiding 2025 revenues to ~$2.17B. [3] Revolut meanwhile posted $4B in revenue in 2024 (+72% YoY), launching into wealth and trading verticals. [4]

Strategic implications: For Current, doubling down on retention and monetization (via financial services, savings, credit, premium features) seems necessary to compete profitably. Partnerships and regulatory capital access will be critical. Investors are placing growing emphasis on capital efficiency and recurring revenue. Those who can embed products and expand wallet share with customers will be rewarded; those overly focused on acquisition alone face pressure as deal sizes for fintech funding rise (investors becoming pickier). [5]

Open questions:

What is Current’s present revenue mix? How much comes from interchange vs subscription vs interest income?

Has Current raised enough capital to scale bank-like services (credit, deposits)? What are its funding terms, cost of capital?

How resilient is its customer base to macroeconomic stress, especially with consumer spending tight, rates high, and regulation evolving?

What barriers exist in Current’s path to profitability—chiefly, fraud losses, margins on deposits, regulatory compliance costs?

Supporting Notes

Neobanks generate growing user bases: Revolut reached ~60 million global users in mid-2025; revenues in 2024 were $4.0B with year-on-year growth of ~72 % driven by wealth, FX, and card payments. [4]

Chime in Q3 2025 posted 29 % YoY revenue growth to $544 M; its active member base grew 21 % to 9.1 M; it’s projecting full-year revenues around $2.163–$2.173 B. [3]

Global fintech funding trends in Q2 2025: $11B raised across 390 rounds, with average deal size rising to ~$28.2M, and “mega rounds” (> $100M) saw sharp increase, indicating investor preference moving toward later-stage, revenue-proven fintechs. [5]

Payments firms made up $126 B of $378 B global fintech revenues in 2024 (~33 %), showing stickiness and profitability of payments/interchange models. [2]

According to Fintech Labs, as of May 2024, Current had ~2.2 M customers—a smaller base relative to peers but indicating growth potential. [6]