Paycheck-to-paycheck Americans pay up to 80% of bank overdraft fees
Zuben Matthews · How he grew to $100M ARR—then exited for $460M. | Zuben Matthews, Founder of Brigit · PMF Show · Jul 14, 2025 · at 11:54
Brigit founder Zuben Matthews explains customer segmentation and who bears the brunt of bank overdraft charges.
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“And then you start to see who's paying 80% or 75% of those fees, who's paying Is it people who've got 10,000 dollars in their bank account who just made a mistake and didn't transfer money from one place to the other? It's not. It's the hundred plus million Americans, now over a hundred and fifty million Americans who live paycheck to paycheck, who are thin file or no file credit scores. That was the use, that was the profile of the user who was paying for it.”
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Chase, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America each made $2B in overdraft
“Chase, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America at that point in time, again, going back to seven years, were each making two billion annually. That's so give or take six billion, and almost all of that goes to their nibbets. It's almost all Pre-tax profit.”
US banks generated $30B annually in overdraft fees around 2018
“The reality is when we started our company, banks, We're making about thirty billion dollars in overdraw fees. Thirty billion dollars.”
Average bank overdraft borrowers paid $69 to borrow $70 for four days
“What we saw Was the average overdraft borrowing was only about 70 dollars, and people were overdrafting twice, so paying about 68, 69 dollars in fees for a matter of four days of borrowing.”
Bank cash flow data outperforms FICO for underwriting short-term mismatches
“That is why cash flow data, the information in someone's bank account relative to the old school FICO or your TransUnion Experian Equifax credit score, I would argue is far more useful for this use case, and which is the only core piece of technology that our …”
Matthews argues bank overdraft fees are more expensive than payday loans
“I would argue overdrafts are more expensive, but payday lenders tend to have a different way of looking at the world as well.”
In-house cash-flow underwriting restricts Brigit's fraud to under 20 basis points
“The underwriting and the fraud tools that we, we've built all in-house, combined with the data that we use, again, only cash flow, help us restrict fraud to well under, the way we would define it, under, it was 20 bips of all our losses.”