This year’s Innovation Series returns with bigger impact and broader horizons. Since 2018, this annual showcase has spotlighted forward-thinking solutions by giving innovators a stage to share ideas, demonstrate solutions, and spark meaningful change.
The Innovation Series is celebrating 2026 with a diverse slate of finalists whose breakthroughs are reshaping member experience, data and business intelligence, lending, employee engagement, fraud prevention, and digital member engagement — all with the power to help credit unions thrive in a rapidly evolving marketplace.
Read on to learn more about this year’s finalists in Data & Business Intelligence: Amsive, Passerelle, Sogolytics, Xenodata.
Amsive
Describe your innovation.
Amsive’s Member Growth Engine (MGE) is a scalable growth framework that helps credit unions expand member relationships more efficiently by aligning product adoption to the member journey.
The Member Growth Engine combines first-party data, behavioral and life-stage signals, predictive segmentation, and automated multichannel activation to identify members most likely to benefit from their next financial product. These insights are activated through coordinated messaging across email, paid media, direct mail, and owned digital channels.
Unlike siloed, product-centric campaigns, the Member Growth Engine is designed around the full member lifecycle, spanning deposits, cards, lending, investments, and insurance. By meeting members at the right moment with relevant guidance and appropriately matched products, the MGE increases product adoption, deepens engagement, and improves marketing efficiency. Continuous testing and optimization allow performance to improve over time, creating a repeatable system for sustainable, member-aligned growth.
What opportunity or challenge does it address?
Credit unions face increasing pressure to grow product adoption and deepen member relationships while operating with limited budgets, smaller teams, and fragmented data. Traditional growth efforts are often product-centric and campaign-based, treating each product as a separate initiative rather than part of a connected member lifecycle. This approach makes product growth inefficient, driving low adoption, inconsistent engagement, and limited long-term impact.
The Member Growth Engine addresses this challenge by using the member journey as the organizing principle for growth. By aligning products and services to where members are in their financial lifecycle, the Engine makes product adoption more effective and efficient — driving higher usage, deeper relationships, and stickier services over time. Instead of relying on volume-based promotion, it prioritizes relevance and readiness, allowing credit unions to grow product depth and lifetime value without increasing waste or eroding trust.
How does it increase member value?
The Cross-Sell Engine increases member value by shifting the credit union’s role from reactive product marketer to proactive financial partner.
It helps credit unions identify member needs earlier, using behavioral patterns and life-stage indicators, then delivers timely, relevant recommendations aligned to members’ real financial situations. Messaging is educational and purpose-driven, helping members understand why a product may be beneficial — not just that it exists.
By reducing irrelevant outreach and replacing generic promotions with personalized guidance, members experience clearer communication, less friction, and more meaningful engagement — building trust and supporting better financial decisions over time.
What differentiates this innovation from competitors?
Most cross-sell solutions focus on individual products, single channels, or point-in-time campaigns. Amsive’s Cross-Sell Engine is different in four key ways:
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- Journey-led, not product-led: The CSE is designed around the member lifecycle, applying consistent logic across all product lines rather than optimizing one product at a time.
- Modular and scalable: Credit unions can deploy individual components or the full engine, making it adaptable to different maturity levels, team sizes, and growth goals.
- True multichannel orchestration: Insights are activated across paid, owned, and offline channels in a coordinated way—rather than operating in silos.
- Built for continuous improvement: Ongoing testing, learning, and measurement are embedded into the framework, allowing performance to improve over time instead of resetting with each campaign.
The result is a practical, repeatable system that delivers measurable growth while improving the member experience — something few competitors can offer at scale.
Passerelle:
Describe your innovation.
Passerelle’s Data Rocket® helps credit unions modernize their data estate to better serve members and internal stakeholders and lead with confidence. Data Rocket’s innovation is not about introducing new tools, but about enabling credit unions to move faster and make better decisions without disrupting the necessary data dial tone to drive continuous business outcomes.
Data Rocket provides a practical path to unified data in the cloud, establishing a centralized, governed data foundation on Snowflake, with prebuilt accelerators and repeatable data models designed for credit unions. The Data Rocket architecture allows teams to spend less time assembling and validating data and more time acting on insight and creating value for the organization.
Building on this foundation, Data Rocket’s Banking Assistant is an agentic AI tool that gives leaders and teams a simple way to ask questions of trusted data using natural language. Technology operates quietly in the background, enabling clarity and confidence rather than complexity.
What opportunity or challenge does it address?
Credit unions are expected to deliver personalized, timely experiences while operating with lean teams and legacy systems. Data is often locked in the core or spread across disconnected tools, making it difficult to get a complete view of member behavior, performance, or risk.
Data Rocket helps credit unions take ownership of their data and use it to support day-to-day decisions. By modernizing analytics and reporting on Snowflake, credit unions reduce reliance on manual extracts, improve consistency, and gain the flexibility to respond as member needs and market conditions change.
How does it increase member value?
Members benefit when credit unions can understand their needs quickly and respond with confidence. Data Rocket shortens the time between question and action by giving teams faster access to trusted information.
With better visibility into member activity and trends, credit unions can engage more personally, time outreach more effectively, and reduce friction across services. Staff spend less time reconciling reports and more time helping members.
The result is a more responsive credit union that delivers consistent, relevant experiences as expectations evolve.
What differentiates this innovation from competitors?
Data Rocket is built specifically for how credit unions operate and make decisions.
Rather than focusing on dashboards or one-off analytics projects, Data Rocket focuses on creating a durable data foundation that supports many use cases over time. Prebuilt accelerators and governance patterns reduce implementation effort and risk, while Snowflake provides the scalability credit unions need without locking them into vendor-controlled reporting.
Most importantly, Data Rocket allows credit unions to decouple insight from the core system. This creates long-term flexibility, reduces dependency on third parties, and ensures the credit union controls how its data is used to serve members.
Sogolytics:
Describe your innovation.
Sogolytics enables credit unions to turn member experience and data into clear, actionable decision intelligence.
Credit unions collect feedback, operational metrics, and performance data, but these insights are often fragmented across systems. As a result, leaders see scores and reports, but lack clarity on how member experience impacts loyalty, efficiency, and financial outcomes.
Our innovation connects these dots.
Sogolytics unifies member feedback, journey insights, operational data, and employee input into a single intelligence layer. This allows credit union leaders to understand where experience friction occurs, why it happens, and how it affects outcomes such as retention and cost to serve.
Rather than relying on periodic surveys, we enable continuous, contextual listening across key member interactions. This helps credit unions identify issues early, prioritize what matters most, and take action with speed and accountability.
By translating experience signals into business insight, Sogolytics helps credit unions operationalize member experience and use it as a lever for loyalty, efficiency, and informed leadership decisions.
What opportunity or challenge does it address?
We work with over 55 credit unions, including First Credit Union ($770.9M, Chandler, AZ) which used Sogolytics to modernize how they collect and act on member feedback, transforming their understanding of the member experience and driving real operational improvements.
Before adopting Sogolytics, First Credit Union relied on a “secret shopper” program and lengthy surveys that produced data that was slow, indirect, and hard to turn into action. The credit union needed direct member feedback that could drive strategy and reinforce its core value of putting members first.
After implementing Sogolytics, creating and distributing surveys became simple and fast, and results were available in real time rather than weeks later. First Credit Union expanded feedback collection across critical moments in the member journey — including teller interactions, loan applications, phone center calls, and digital channels — providing a more complete and authentic picture of the member experience.
With these insights, the credit union could segment and analyze feedback by journey stage, revealing what members truly valued and where gaps existed. These insights informed improvements such as streamlining the account opening process and reshaping staff training, leading to smoother experiences that more closely aligned with member expectations.
How does it increase member value?
This innovation increases member value by helping credit unions better listen to, understand, and respond to their members as individuals, not account numbers.
Members often experience friction that feels small in isolation but deeply frustrating over time. Confusing digital experiences, delayed service, or feeling unheard can quietly erode trust. Sogolytics helps credit unions surface these moments early by capturing feedback at the moments that matter most, across digital, branch, and service interactions.
By connecting member feedback with operational and business insight, credit unions can focus on fixing what truly affects members’ lives. This leads to smoother experiences, faster resolution, and more thoughtful service that reflects real member needs.
Just as importantly, the platform enables credit unions to close the loop with members. When members see their input acknowledged and acted upon, it reinforces the cooperative promise and builds confidence that their credit union is listening and acting in their best interest.
The result is a more human, responsive, and trustworthy experience that strengthens loyalty and deepens long-term member relationships.
What differentiates this innovation from competitors?
Sogolytics delivers industry experience, advanced technology and superior customer support that the competition can’t match
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- Industry-Specific Intelligence: With the Sogolytics Experience Navigator, credit unions are able to get ready to implement action plans on day one, specifically built for their business objectives, whether they be member retention, community loyalty, or loan growth.
- From Insights To Action: While competitors offer survey deployment, we bridge the gap between data collection and strategic implementation. Our platform combines AI-powered survey creation, reporting, and action plans, with white glove customer support, making the process simple and fast from ideation to action. Real-time analytics allow credit unions to immediately address member acquisition, retention, and engagement challenges.
- Proven Credit Union Expertise: It’s not just about the technology. Sogolytics works with many of the largest credit unions in the country and has valuable experience helping businesses in the industry to reach their goals. No matter what your challenges are, we’ve likely faced them in the past, and we bring that knowledge to every strategy session and customer support call.
XenoDATA:
Describe your innovation.
XenoDATA helps credit union leadership take control of data and AI initiatives. We combine software and a done-with-you operating model so leaders can see what’s being worked on, prioritize the initiatives that matter most, and ensure data efforts deliver real business results.
What opportunity or challenge does it address?
As credit unions grow, data and AI initiatives multiply, costs rise, and accountability becomes harder. Leadership is often left managing a mix of tools, consultants, and frameworks without a clear way to prioritize work or measure progress. XenoDATA addresses this by giving leaders structure, visibility, and shared ownership so data programs can be run like any other critical business function.
How does it increase member value?
When leadership focuses data work on the initiatives that directly impact members, decisions improve and resources are used more effectively. At CEFCU ($8.1B, Peoria, IL), this approach made it easier to connect data efforts to real business initiatives and communicate progress across the organization. The result is better products, pricing, and service for members.
What differentiates this innovation from competitors?
Most providers offer either software or frameworks. Software shows information, while frameworks describe what should happen. XenoDATA combines both in a done-with-you model focused on outcomes. We work alongside leadership to operationalize data programs, reduce wasted spend, and ensure initiatives deliver measurable results.