PYMNTS Panel Concludes Credit Unions Face an AI Trust Test
PYMNTS Panel Concludes Credit Unions Face an AI Trust Test
Publish Date: 2026-06-18 04:03:00
Source Domain: www.pymnts.com
The conventional wisdom surrounding artificial intelligence in financial services is that the race has already started, and anyone who is not sprinting has already fallen behind.
Three executives participating in a PYMNTS discussion offered a different view. Agentic AI may be transforming financial services, but credit unions have an opportunity to move deliberately rather than recklessly, using the technology to strengthen member relationships instead of simply replacing manual work.
For Jeremiah Lotz, senior vice president, Enterprise Data and AI, at Velera, the technology represents a shift away from administrative automation.
“This is a critical moment for credit unions,” Lotz said. “AI is moving from a back-office efficiency type of opportunity to becoming something that can support decisions and interactions and workflows in real time.”
Credit unions compete differently than many financial institutions. Their value proposition has long rested on trust, service and personal relationships. Agentic AI has the potential to reinforce those strengths, but only if institutions resist the temptation to treat automation as an end in itself.
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The opportunity extends beyond reducing costs. AI can give frontline employees better information before conversations, accelerate fraud investigations, improve dispute resolution and simplify internal research, allowing staff to spend more time with members and less time navigating administrative work.
“The goal shouldn’t be to replace the relationship aspect of it,” Lotz said. “It really should be, ‘How do we use it to scale the quality of that relationship?’”
Outcomes, Not Just Speed
Cal Al-Dhubaib, principal technologist at Rubrik, said institutions may be measuring success the wrong way.
“I am convinced that time savings is the worst measure of the value of AI,” he said.
There’s a broader challenge facing financial institutions. Automating an existing process…
