Think of it as Shark Tank with a credit union spin, and it’s just been renewed for another season.
The 2025 Innovation Series from CreditUnions.com and Callahan & Associates is underway. Every year since 2018, this series has offered a select group of suppliers 10 minutes each to impress an audience of credit union decision-makers. It’s simple: Each vendor pitches its offerings and attendees vote on their favorites.
The Innovation Series was a hit from the get-go and continues to grow in popularity. This year’s focus areas include financial wellness, member experience, lending, digital, analytics, and member engagement.
Read on for more from this year’s financial wellness finalists Conductiv Inc., Corridor Platforms, EDGE, Powerlytics. Plus, make sure to join us for the Innovations In Analytics webinar. Register today!
Conductiv Inc.
Describe your innovation.
Conductiv is digital stipulations and AI – verification/proof of (VoIE) income, employment, cash flows, tax returns, alternative data, and more.
What opportunity or challenge does it address?
Credit unions often require members to provide paper documentation and visit the branch to obtain a loan or open a deposit account. This reliance on paper means higher fraud levels, a poor member experience, lots of manual work for lending opps teams, and too many lost loans and deposits. Conductiv digitizes document collection and provides AI to find patterns in lending. The platform reduces fraud, improves the member experience, saves hundreds of hours a month in manual work, and increases approval/account opening rates by up to 47%.
How does it increase member value?
- Paper paystubs/documents or branch visits are no longer required to get approved/open an account.
- Fraud and time to loan is dramatically reduced, and more loans and accounts can be made/opened without increasing risk.
What differentiates this innovation from competitors?
- Conductiv is pre-integrated with many POS and LOS systems providing turnkey access for 3k+ lenders.
- The platform can be implemented in just 4 hours with no IT resources needed.
- Our AI finds patterns to improve lending and also works with existing alternative credit score providers.
- The platform never stores member PII minimizing risk.
Corridor Platforms
Describe your innovation.
Built by a team of seasoned risk professionals, RiskDecisioning.AI (RD.ai) addresses the critical need for speed, innovation, and governance in financial decision-making, transforming how FIs experiment, deploy, and iterate on analytics in today’s fast-paced digital era. RD.ai by Corridor Platforms is an end-to-end decisioning platform designed to empower financial institutions with cutting-edge AI and big data technologies on a highly automated and governed analytical platform.
What opportunity or challenge does it address?
Mid-market FIs face significant challenges when competing against Tier 1 FIs or aggressive fintechs for digital loan applicants. Tier 1 FIs, equipped with advanced digital capabilities and cutting-edge decisioning systems, often outperform mid-market FIs in member acquisition, marketing, and retention.
With consumers now expecting instant, seamless, and highly personalized experiences, banks and credit unions must leverage vast amounts of data on current and prospective members in real-time. However, the same data is equally accessible to competitors. This creates a critical disadvantage for mid-market FIs, which are often constrained by outdated systems, fragmented data, and limited decisioning capabilities. These limitations leave them struggling to compete effectively with Tier 1 banks and fintech disruptors already leading in personalized, data-driven decisioning.
This inability to deliver best-in-class decisioning results in subpar customer relationships, increased portfolio risk, and the potential loss of valuable members to more agile competitors. Mid-market FIs must move beyond rented point scores and instead build robust in-house capabilities that enable them to make contextually relevant, instant decisions while maintaining compliance with stringent lending laws. That is where RD.AI comes in.
How does it increase member value?
To meet the growing expectations of today’s members, credit unions must deliver instant, personalized decisions that align with their unique needs. Corridor Platforms enables credit unions to provide real-time decision actions that offer contextually relevant solutions across the member lifecycle — whether it’s acquisition, marketing, or portfolio and loss management.
By automating decisioning with over 85% efficiency, credit unions can offer seamless, personalized experiences with speed while maintaining compliance. This empowers credit unions to provide faster approvals, point-of-sale financing, real-time credit limit adjustments, etc., while also proactively managing and monitoring risks. With this solution, members experience a more responsive, member-centric approach to their financial needs.
What differentiates this innovation from competitors?
RiskDecisoning.AI is a full-stack decisioning platform that extends beyond scoring to deliver end-to-end decision actions. Key differentiators include:
- End-to-End Decisioning: RD.AI enables AI-driven decision actions across the entire portfolio: consumer and commercial lending, including dynamic pricing and contextual offers, driving higher applicant uptake and deposit product pricing. It optimizes the entire member lifecycle—acquisition, portfolio management, marketing, and loss management to maximize long-term customer value.
- Integration Flexibility: RD.AI seamlessly integrates with bureau scores (e.g., Transunion, Zest.ai, Scienaptic) while offering proprietary & in-house decisioning capabilities.
- Post-Production Monitoring & Refinement: Automated dashboards to track performance and trigger alerts if models underperform — creating a continuous improvement loop.
- Whitebox Transparency: Unlike black box score providers, RD.AI grants CUs full access to decision logic, enabling internal capability building and ensuring compliance without vendor dependency.
EDGE
Describe your innovation.
Credit unions can finally leverage their own data to improve member care, without the need for in-house analytics teams. EDGE’s direct-to-core integrations provide 360-views of member financial health, via summarized and/or AI-driven insights, such as income verification (and the ability to repay), total debt payments (including BNPL), cashflow-driven credit scores for those with thin or no credit files. Because of the direct-to-core integration, credit unions can get these member insights without drop-offs that could happen with IBV. Our platform also delivers data “off us” insights for members and non-members with accounts at another financial institution giving credit unions a full 360-view of their members regardless of where they bank. This opens the door for credit unions by allowing them to offer their members competitive products, in a streamlined and automated fashion like most large banks and fintechs can do today.
What opportunity or challenge does it address?
Loan officers and underwriters at the credit union can now see real-time cashflow insights including members’ income, spending and balance behaviors, without the need for the member to credential, a frictionless member experience.
Through EDGE’s open banking network, Trius also now sees data and insights from external financial accounts. Members and non-members alike can provide consent and share their external accounts with Trius in seconds just like they would normally log in to another account.
After implementing EDGE for 100% of applications, Trius successfully verified income for over 80% of members with a primary account at the credit union and over 6% of all applications. This enormous benefit was available with zero added friction for members. As a result, Trius eliminated a great majority of income stipulations and measurably improved look to book rates.
How does it increase member value?
Credit unions can now provide more personalized care with at-a-glance financial insights. Members will likely have better access to credit or optimized offers, as cashflow analytics fills in blind spots in FICO scores and other traditional credit bureau data.
What differentiates this innovation from competitors?
EDGE was the first cashflow consumer reporting agency and the only agency with direct-to-core insights for cashflow data. Unlike competitors, we offer summaries of data and machine-generated insights, instead of raw or lists of transaction data.
Powerlytics
Describe your innovation.
Powerlytics is a proprietary data platform providing access to the complete financial pictures of all households and businesses across the U.S. With over 20 years of developing powerful IP, including consulting with the federal government, Powerlytics now enables credit unions to streamline underwriting through frictionless income verification and estimation, optimize marketing through accurate estimates of household deposits and business revenue, and empower smarter risk-management and targeting through machine learning performance models.
What opportunity or challenge does it address?
Powerlytics’ income estimates and confidence scores, underpinned by anonymized IRS tax return data, eliminate the tedious income verification process and accelerate underwriting to meet both the rising expectations of modern consumers and the ever-increasing competition from fintechs. By incorporating investable asset data into deposit growth strategies, credit unions can identify new members with the highest deposit potential while simultaneously capturing greater wallet share with current members. Additionally, data analytics can be leveraged to improve marketing ROI and create operational efficiencies through custom propensity models that identify members most likely to engage with specific products or cure delinquent accounts. Powerlytics’ team of Ph.D. data scientists simplify these complex analytical processes to ensure credit unions can focus on delivering member-centric solutions and building relationships.
How does it increase member value?
Powerlytics’ Source of Truth data allows credit unions to analyze income and wealth trends, as well as savings patterns, to identify underserved member segments and provide tailored solutions that enable broader financial participation. Incorporating these insights into generational personas, particularly focusing on wealth transfer opportunities, allows credit unions to create offerings resonating with younger and older members alike while proactively engaging the next generation of market share. Powerlytics’ thousands of consumer financial data variables empower credit unions to create a simplified member experience that leads to fewer loan applicant drop-offs, reducing adverse selection and approving more high-quality loans. Additionally, this data can be used to extend proactive credit line increases that meet member needs while balancing risk.
What differentiates this innovation from competitors?
Powerlytics is the only data CUSO providing zero-friction income verification and investable asset solutions to cover 100% of U.S. households and businesses. Our permissionless platform and proprietary IP empowers credit unions with Source of Truth insights, unlike less-accurate modeled solutions, to drive wallet share and enable risk decisioning through data. Powerlytics data does not rely on client contributions or member opt-ins that result in incomplete coverage like consortium or survey-based models and requires no exchange of PII.
