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 digital member engagement: Array, Exagens, Narmi, Swaystack
Array
Describe your innovation.
Array+ is an embeddable free-to-premium product suite that enables credit unions to deliver financial-management tools directly within their digital experiences. The platform brings together credit monitoring, identity and privacy protection, subscription management, student loan optimization, credit building, and more into a unified, modular offering with a seamless upgrade path.
Array+ transforms fragmented, standalone services into a cohesive, revenue-generating experience delivered through trusted financial institutions. With a single integration, credit unions can launch brandable, compliant modules quickly, drive non-interest income through premium subscriptions, and sustain engagement through ongoing, data-driven interactions that improve loyalty and lifetime value. Members gain meaningful tools to manage their financial health and digital identity within their primary financial relationship.
Array+ operates exclusively through a B2B2C model. Credit unions retain brand ownership and member relationships while leveraging Array’s infrastructure, bureau partnerships, and compliance expertise. By consolidating capabilities that would otherwise require multiple vendors or complex in-house builds, Array+ reduces development time, cost, and regulatory burden.
With Array+, credit unions can turn digital banking into a destination for continuous engagement, protection, and financial progress.
What opportunity or challenge does it address?
Credit unions face rising expectations for digital experiences while traditional revenue sources face pressure. At the same time, members manage their finances across disconnected third-party tools, leading to fragmentation, disengagement, and weaker relationships.
Array+ enables credit unions to extend digital banking into a broader financial support platform. Embedded tools for credit visibility, identity and privacy protection, debt and subscription management, credit building, and more keep the institution relevant across a member’s full financial journey.
The free-to-premium model creates recurring non-interest income while delivering immediate member value, aligning financial sustainability with tools members actively use.
In practice, credit unions can:
- Turn financial wellness into a revenue driver.
- Increase engagement across free and premium users.
- Monetize existing members without upfront platform investment.
- Compete with fintech and direct-to-consumer subscription products inside a trusted brand.
How does it increase member value?
Array+ delivers financial clarity, protection, and control within the credit union’s trusted digital environment. Members gain practical tools that reduce complexity, support informed decision-making, and lower financial stress without relying on multiple external services.
Through integrated capabilities spanning credit, debt, subscriptions, identity, privacy, and credit building, members gain greater visibility into their financial position and stronger control over risk and long-term outcomes. This reinforces the credit union’s role as a trusted steward of financial well-being and personal security.
By providing consistent, day-to-day value, Array+ strengthens engagement, loyalty, and trust throughout the member lifecycle.
What differentiates this innovation from competitors?
Array+ is differentiated by its ability to replace fragmented point solutions and direct-to-consumer subscriptions with a single, embedded engagement platform owned by the credit union. Members access credit, identity, privacy, and financial management tools within a familiar, trusted digital experience, strengthening engagement and reinforcing the institution’s role as a primary financial partner.
In contrast to standalone tools or DTC monetization platforms, Array+ consolidates multiple high-value capabilities into one modular platform that is simple to integrate and operate at scale. Credit unions avoid multi-vendor complexity while delivering a seamless member experience.
Array+ is also structurally differentiated by its free-to-premium model. Array covers data costs for the free experience and continuously optimizes engagement and upgrades, enabling credit unions to deliver immediate value while participating in recurring, non-interest income through revenue sharing. This model aligns member benefit with institutional performance in a way competitors cannot easily replicate.
As a result, Array+ functions as an engagement and revenue engine, not just a feature set, helping credit unions deepen trust, extend relevance, and support stronger financial outcomes over time.
Exagens
Describe your innovation.
Behavioral Banking enables emotionally sticky relationships to be created and nurtured, cost-effectively, individually, and at scale, with the growing pool of members who now rarely interact with credit unions in-person. It makes possible the benefits of customer engagement, loyalty, and financial wellness in an era when most interactions and transactions occur through digital channels.
MoneySparxs, exagens’ latest Behavioral Banking solution, fuses behavioral economics, neuroscience, advanced data analytics, psychology, and AI with a credit to understand the financial decisions of individuals, and then effectively engage and influence them to make smarter financial decisions. It adds incredible new value to your existing data and enriches it further. Behavioral Banking is needed because people are constantly being swayed by cognitive biases, emotions, and social factors, and therefore rarely make rational decisions when it comes to their finances. Behavioral Banking solutions enable credit unions to grow with their members by catalyzing them to save, spend, invest, and borrow wiser both through their digital channels as well as in-branch.
What opportunity or challenge does it address?
The Challenge: The ease and convenience of digital banking has yielded an explosion in the frequency of banking interactions and significant cost savings for financial institutions. It has also fractured financial relationships and their benefits. People who primarily bank through digital channels report being significantly less engaged with their financial institution, resulting in lower share of wallet, reduced loyalty, decreased customer satisfaction, and an adverse impact on financial health.
The Opportunity: This disconnect provides credit unions with a unique opportunity to differentiate and grow by leveraging their historical strengths to differentiate their member experience and compete with big banks who otherwise far outspend them on technology. Exagens’ MoneySparxs enables credit unions to elevate their digital and in-branch experiences and move beyond providers of mostly commodity products and services to trusted and valued financial partners in the lives of their members.
The results: Credit unions utilizing Behavioral Banking have benefited from increased deposits, expanded wallet share, higher card utilization, membership growth, and great loyalty, all while helping improve the financial lives of their members. All with minimal additional workload for the credit union and no core integration of sensitive PII required.
How does it increase member value?
MoneySparxs enables credit unions to grow financially with their members by delivering Behavioral Baking at scale through their digital channels. It delivers emotionally and financially engaging Sparxs* (personal & community money-related tips, wisdom, suggestions & fun insights) which catalyzes individuals to save, spend, invest, and borrow wisely.
What differentiates this innovation from competitors?
Based in behavioral science and leveraging AI, goes well beyond traditional methods of segmenting, personas, and journey mapping by treating and interacting with each individual member in terms of their unique financial situation. With a deep understanding of human behavior and financial decision making (why decisions are and are not made), MoneySparxs is able to catalyze members in ways beneficial to them and their credit unions.
Exagens designed MoneySparxs from the ground up with the sensibilities and realities of credit unions in mind. It is cost-effective, requires no PII, produces results quickly, and does not require any additional credit union resources to operate – exagens does most of the work, credit unions and their members get all of the benefit.
Narmi
Describe your innovation.
Narmi’s MCP server is built around an open-source standard that allows AI models (LLMs) to securely and seamlessly connect to external data sources (banking data). MCP servers process requests from the LLMs and provide or deny access to the data source. The MCP server enables AI models to analyze business and user finances without storing any sensitive data and maintaining bank-grade security protocols.
What opportunity or challenge does it address?
Organic AI uptake is growing at a dramatic rate, to the point where LLMs like ChatGPT are the standard “homepage” for accessing the internet for many users – especially younger ones. Leveraging this standard gives a credit union a presence on platforms where its members will increasingly expect to bank.
How does it increase member value?
Even now at this read-only stage, members who use Narmi’s MCP with their credit union can input queries like: “What’s my checking account balance?”; “Can you categorize my top 10 recurring vendors?”; or “What expenses could I reduce to improve margins next quarter?” and derive insights from iterative conversations in a way that is much more dynamic than a traditional digital banking experience. This increases stickiness for banks that offer this technology and provides functionality that is differentiated from even megabank user experiences.
What differentiates this innovation from competitors?
As mentioned above, this functionality is differentiated not only from our peers servicing community banks and credit unions, but even from megabanks, who are not yet at the point of offering user-facing AI functionality. While other vendors in our space have begun to develop around this protocol, Narmi was the first to pursue it, launched the first MCP server with a U.S. bank with Grasshopper last September, and has had the most time to develop standards and innovation around it.
Swaystack
Describe your innovation.
Credit unions turn new accounts into active, primary relationships with Swaystack, a digital onboarding and engagement platform. Using gamified, personalized journeys inside digital banking and across email and SMS, credit unions leverage Swaystack to drive funding, direct deposit, product adoption, and long-term engagement from day one.
Beyond onboarding, credit unions continue to engage members and sustain momentum well after activation with Swaystack. Through behavior-based targeting and personalized omnichannel campaigns, credit unions guide members toward their next best action — whether that’s switching direct deposit, increasing card usage, enrolling in digital services, or adopting additional products.
What opportunity or challenge does it address?
Nearly half of newly opened accounts go inactive within the first year, even though financial institutions spend $400+ to acquire each one. Onboarding is fragmented across teams and vendors, with no clear ownership and no accountability for activation. Swaystack solves this by owning onboarding end-to-end — connecting acquisition to real usage and measurable outcomes.
How does it increase member value?
Credit unions increase member value by driving the behaviors that matter most early in the relationship — funded accounts, direct deposit adoption, debit card usage, and ongoing product engagement. By guiding members through clear, behavior-based onboarding journeys, credit unions grow deposits, increase debit card interchange, and accelerate digital product adoption. The result is stronger primacy, higher lifetime value per member, and more durable relationships from day one.
What differentiates this innovation from competitors?
For too long, credit unions have relied on point solutions to drive single actions — one tool for email, another for direct deposit, another for card activation — without a clear way to connect effort to outcomes. Swaystack replaces that fragmentation with a unified onboarding experience, allowing credit unions to target the right members with the right action at the right time and pair those actions with incentives that gamify onboarding. Every interaction is tied to measurable results like funding rates, direct deposit adoption, and early engagement— driving real ROI, not vanity metrics.