Why Are Klarna, Revolut and Mercury Racing for US Bank Charters in 2026?

More than 20 fintechs, digital-asset firms and lenders have applied for or received a US bank charter in the first half of 2026 alone. Klarna’s July 6 filing for “Klarna Bank USA” is the highest-profile entry in a wave that also includes Revolut, Mercury, Erebor and Nubank — and it signals that the years-long fintech strategy of renting a bank’s charter is giving way to owning one outright.

What is driving fintechs to seek full US bank charters?

Fintechs want bank charters primarily to fund lending with customer deposits instead of expensive wholesale credit lines, which directly widens net interest margin. A charter also removes dependence on a single sponsor bank, a structural weak point that has caused outages and compliance failures across the industry.

Most consumer fintechs today operate through a “rented” bank relationship. Klarna has used WebBank as its lending partner; Chime routes deposits through Stride Bank and The Bancorp Bank; Robinhood’s new banking product runs through Coastal Community Bank. That arrangement caps how fast a fintech can expand state by state, exposes it to its partner bank’s regulatory problems, and leaves loan economics dependent on funding it doesn’t control. Holding a charter — and the deposits that come with it — solves all three problems at once, which is why the current wave spans companies as different as a Swedish buy-now-pay-later giant and a business-banking startup for founders.

What did Klarna file for, and why does it matter?

Klarna submitted applications to the Utah Department of Financial Institutions and the FDIC on July 6, 2026, to establish “Klarna Bank USA” as a Utah-chartered industrial loan company (ILC) — the same charter route Square (now Block) used in 2020. The filing cited roughly $91.3 billion in credit extended to US customers since 2019, about 30 million annual US customers, and more than 5 million Klarna Card users as of Q1 2026, with former Milestone Bank and Prime Alliance Bank executive Gary Harding proposed as the new bank’s CEO.

The timing is notable against Klarna’s stock performance: the company IPO’d on the NYSE in September 2025 at $40 a share, valuing it around $15.1 billion — well below its $45.6 billion peak in 2021 — and by mid-July 2026 shares were trading closer to $17–19, putting its market cap near $7.3 billion. A bank charter gives Klarna a new lever — direct deposit funding and expanded lending products — to argue for a stronger valuation story than “just” a BNPL app competing on checkout placement.

How does Klarna’s filing fit the broader 2026 charter wave?

Klarna is one of at least twenty fintech, digital-asset and lending firms that filed for or received conditional approval of a US bank charter in the first half of 2026, following roughly 18 OCC applications in 2025 alone — nearly matching the previous four years combined. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency projects around 25 applications for the full year.

Revolut filed with the OCC and FDIC on March 5, 2026, for a national charter, naming a new US CEO and committing $500 million to the market after withdrawing an earlier California application in 2023; its valuation reached $75 billion after a November 2025 secondary sale, and the company expects a 12–18 month review. Mercury, which serves an estimated one in three US startups and holds around $20 billion in customer deposits, filed with the OCC in December 2025 — a deposit base that would already rank it among the top 100 US banks if approved. Erebor Bank, backed by Peter Thiel and Palmer Luckey, set the pace for the whole cohort: it went from OCC filing to conditional approval in about four months and was fully operational within eight, the first de novo national bank charter granted in four years. Brazil’s Nubank received conditional OCC approval to enter the US as a de novo national bank in January 2026. Not every fintech is racing to file, though — Chime’s leadership calls a charter “a when, not if,” reviewed every six months, while still relying on partner banks Stride and Bancorp.

What’s the difference between an industrial bank charter and a national bank charter?

An industrial loan company (ILC) charter, like Klarna’s, is granted by a handful of states — mainly Utah — and supervised jointly with the FDIC, while a national bank charter, like Revolut’s and Mercury’s, comes directly from the OCC and permits uniform operation across all 50 states. The two routes carry meaningfully different scopes of activity, holding-company oversight and Federal Reserve involvement.

A third category has become the most contested: national trust charters, which the OCC has granted conditionally to crypto- and payments-adjacent firms including Ripple, Paxos and BitGo. Trust charters do not require FDIC deposit insurance, and the Bank Policy Institute — backed by the American Bankers Association, the Independent Community Bankers of America and the Conference of State Bank Supervisors — is reportedly weighing a lawsuit against the OCC, arguing the agency is using trust-charter authority to let firms take on deposit-like, payment-like activity without full bank-grade supervision. For any company evaluating a fintech partner’s charter status, this distinction — ILC, national bank, or trust charter — determines what protection actually stands behind a customer’s funds.

Why is the OCC approving charters faster in 2026?

Comptroller Jonathan Gould has set an explicit 120-day target for charter decisions and says the OCC has hit that mark for most applications over the past six months, a sharp acceleration from the multi-year timelines that historically discouraged fintechs from applying at all. Faster review is the single biggest reason the current wave looks different from previous fintech-charter attempts.

That speed is also why observers describe 2026 as a “now or never” moment: fintech leadership teams widely expect the regulatory posture to tighten again under a future administration or after a high-profile failure, so multiple companies are filing in parallel rather than waiting to see how any single application plays out. It is the same logic that drove SoFi’s charter push in 2022, when it acquired Golden Pacific Bancorp to become a bank holding company and immediately began funding loans with deposits instead of wholesale credit — the case study every subsequent applicant, including Klarna, is implicitly following.

What are the risks in this trend, and who is pushing back?

The clearest risk is regulatory reversal: a successful Bank Policy Institute lawsuit, a change in OCC leadership, or a high-profile fintech-bank failure could stall or unwind approvals that companies are currently treating as durable. A secondary risk is supervisory capacity — regulators approving charters faster does not necessarily mean they are staffing bank-grade, ongoing supervision at the same pace.

Community and regional banks, represented by groups like the ABA and ICBA, argue that industrial and trust charters let large tech-adjacent companies capture bank-like economics — deposit funding, payment rails, lending — without carrying full bank-grade capital, consumer-protection and safety-and-soundness obligations. That argument sits alongside a parallel debate in enterprise AI strategy, where companies are similarly racing to formalize infrastructure (agentic payment rails, in this case) faster than governance frameworks can keep up — a pattern covered in more depth in our practical AI governance framework.

What should finance and treasury teams do about this trend?

Corporate finance and procurement teams working with fintech payment or lending partners should now track each partner’s charter status — ILC, national bank, or trust charter — and confirm whether deposits are FDIC-insured directly or only through a sweep arrangement with a partner bank. That single distinction determines counterparty risk in a way “fintech partner bank” relationships previously left opaque.

It is also worth revisiting where a company banks its own operating cash. With roughly one in three US banking customers now naming a neobank as their primary banking relationship, incumbent banks are under real pressure to compete on service and pricing for the corporate accounts, cards and lending relationships they have historically taken for granted. Teams evaluating alternatives can compare current options in our roundup of startup banking and fintech platforms, and treasury teams building broader forecasting resilience around this shift may also find our piece on prediction markets and corporate risk hedging useful for stress-testing counterparty scenarios.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Klarna already a bank in the US?
Not yet. Klarna filed applications with the Utah Department of Financial Institutions and the FDIC on July 6, 2026; approval and launch of “Klarna Bank USA” would follow a review process that recent comparable filings have taken roughly four to eighteen months to complete.

Why did Klarna choose a Utah industrial bank charter instead of a national bank charter?
The Utah ILC route is faster to obtain and was already proven by Square/Block in 2020, letting Klarna add deposit-funded lending without pursuing the broader, slower national charter process that Revolut and Mercury chose instead.

Are deposits at newly chartered fintech banks FDIC-insured?
It depends on the charter type: industrial and national bank charters generally require FDIC insurance, while national trust charters granted to some crypto and payments firms do not — a distinction currently being challenged by bank trade groups.

How long does it typically take to get a US bank charter approved in 2026?
Recent cases range from about four months to conditional approval (Erebor) to twelve-to-eighteen months for a full national charter review (Revolut’s own estimate), reflecting the OCC’s stated 120-day target alongside longer real-world timelines for complex applications.

Which other fintechs are expected to file for a bank charter next?
Reporting names PayPal, Affirm, Upstart, Checkout.com, Bunq and Nissan among firms in or near the OCC pipeline, alongside crypto-focused applicants such as Circle, Paxos, Ripple and BitGo pursuing trust charters.

Son Güncelleme / Last updated: July 15, 2026. Sources: CNBC, American Banker, Banking Dive, PYMNTS.