J.P. Morgan Chase is shutting down its mobile banking app Finn, meant to lure millennials with zero fees and emojis, just a year after its nationwide release.
The bank alerted Finn customers Thursday in emails and online that it will port over their accounts to Chase on Aug. 10. Monthly fees will be waived indefinitely for Finn customers, and account numbers won't need to be changed, according to J.P. Morgan spokesman Pablo Rodriguez.
"The Chase brand is already among the most popular banks for millennials, so we're leaning in on that, rather than continuing to build a brand from scratch," Rodriguez said in a statement. The bank has already incorporated parts of the Finn app, like auto-saving features, into its main banking app, he said.
J.P. Morgan appears to be doubling down on the lure of its physical branch network. It had 5,028 branches as of March and is in the midst of a five-year expansion program to enter new U.S. markets. Having both mobile apps and brick-and-mortar stores has been a winning combination so far, as J.P. Morgan, Bank of America and Wells Fargo have garnered a disproportionate share of new deposits in recent years.
By killing off Finn, the bank removes some confusion over the product: While the app was designed for the digitally inclined, users still had access to the bank's ATMs and tellers, although that access wasn't heavily promoted.
Still, in a time when competitors like Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs are pushing digital offerings under separate brands, J.P. Morgan's move is likely to make waves. The news was reported earlier in The Wall Street Journal.
The bank wouldn't disclose how many Finn accounts existed, but Rodriguez said that more than half of Finn customers also had Chase accounts.