What if your credit union could be in your member’s hand every single day, not just when they log into the app to check a balance?
Greg Post, COO of Members Mobile, and Ben Maxim, CTO at Michigan State University Federal Credit Union and COO of its fintech subsidiary Reseda Group, joined Sarah Snell Cooke of The Credit Union Connection live at GAC 2026 for a conversation about one of the more creative member engagement ideas to come out of the credit union space in a while. Members Mobile is essentially a credit union-branded mobile carrier.
The concept rests on three pillars.
1. Converting existing members to mobile phone service and linking it to their checking account, putting $5 back into their account every month just for being a mobile customer.
2. Attracting new members, specifically millennials and Gen Zs, with a truly compelling offer: One year of free mobile service when they join both the carrier and a credit union for the first time.
3. Giving credit unions a live, data-driven marketing channel that can push the right product at exactly the right moment for a more personalized experience.
Picture this: a member pulling into a car lot on a Saturday afternoon and getting a notification about competitive auto loan rates before they even walk inside.
Ben points out that a $100 account opening bonus is easy to forget, but a phone in your hand every day is not. Members Mobile can preload fintech partner apps, surface the credit union’s own mobile banking experience, and, over time, merge financial transaction data with telecom behavioral data to enable the kind of personalization that most credit unions can only dream about right now.
Who is spending time on Zillow? Who just started searching for auto loans? That is purchase-intent data, and when combined with what a credit union already knows about its members, it becomes incredibly powerful.
Greg calls it Mint Mobile built for credit unions because trust matters. Members already trust their credit union with their money. Extending that trust to their phone carrier is a shorter leap than handing it over to a random company they spotted on a billboard. And for Gen Z members who are aging off their families’ plans and looking for an affordable option to claim a little independence, a $15 to $40 per month plan tied to their new credit union membership is a pretty easy sell.
The data and the real-world results are still coming, both Greg and Ben said, as the service launches in April with a dozen credit unions, with the goal of reaching roughly two per state to create a national footprint that marketing starts to have a real network effect. We’ll check back with them.
NOTE: If transcription were this AI’s superpower, it would be a very disappointing superhero origin story.
Sarah Snell Cooke
Hello, welcome everyone. I am here today at GAC 2026. I am joined by Greg Post from Members Mobile. Welcome.
Greg Post
Thank you.
Sarah Snell Cooke
And a gentleman who needs zero introduction. You know who he is. Ben Maxim of MSU FCU. Welcome. Why don’t you both give a little introduction of yourself and the company and we’ll go from there. Greg, start with you.
Greg Post
I’m Greg Post, COO at Members Mobile. I joined in November. I’ve been a longtime wireless telecommunications veteran and launched markets all over the world. I met the founders of Members Mobile and got extremely excited about what they’re doing and very excited to launch service here.
Ben Maxim
Ben Maxim, CTO at Michigan State University Federal Credit Union, and also COO at our fintech subsidiary Reseed Group, which is where we came across the Members Mobile folks a few years ago when they had this idea to bring mobile service to the credit union space. I have a degree in telecommunications from Michigan State University, so I was like, yep, I get this immediately, how do we help? There were some ideas they had around how to support women in domestic violence situations, but unfortunately that was not a big enough use case to create an entire company around. So in order to help support that initiative, we helped them create the full package that could then be utilized in that use case as well. We were able to help them build and grow maybe even bigger than the plans they had originally. I actually have a working Members Mobile phone that I can use right now, which is really exciting to go from idea creation to actually being able to text, call, and download data on the internet.
Sarah Snell Cooke
I’m actually on the board at FAFE, which is what that initiative ended up being called. So Greg, it may not be immediately obvious to everyone how a mobile phone is an appropriate benefit for credit unions beyond the obvious mobile banking angle. How is this a member benefit?
Greg Post
There are three pillars we’re focused on. The first pillar is existing members of a credit union and converting them to mobile phone service. When they convert, we link the mobile phone service and their checking account together, and those members get $5 sharebacks every month into their checking account. We can save mobile phone users hundreds of dollars a month over what they’re paying today with the big three carriers. The second pillar is bringing in new members, specifically Gen Z and Millennial members. That’s where we’re focusing our marketing dollars and efforts. Affordability is a major buzzword today, especially for Gen Z, and if we can save them hundreds of dollars, we have a really exciting offer for brand new customers to both the mobile phone service and the credit union: one year of free service when they launch. It’s a very compelling promotion. And then the third pillar is helping credit unions grow their revenue and engage with members by pushing the most relevant product to them based on the data we collect together. For example, if someone shows up at a car lot and they’re looking at cars, the credit union can push them a message saying, by the way, we’ve got great rates on auto loans.
Ben Maxim
To reinforce those three points from the credit union perspective: we always see the offers in our mailbox from Chase, like bring over an account and get $900, but you have to do all these things with asterisks. Instead of offering $100 to open an account, what if we paid for your phone service for a certain amount of time, or indefinitely if you meet certain criteria? That phone is then a daily reminder that it came from MSUFCU. It’s an engagement tool. We can preload apps onto the phone. We have a number of fintech partners and we can preload those. We can have MSUFCU Mobile right there. And in the background, we have all this rich data from financial transactions. Telecom has equally rich data. We can actually merge those together and create even more useful data sets in the world of AI, agentic AI, and personalization.
Sarah Snell Cooke
The question is always, if you’re doing all that, are members going to be creeped out? Like, you have my phone and my finances?
Ben Maxim
What financial institutions have always traded on is trust. We have that trust. They come to us for these services. People ran to Mint Mobile because of Ryan Reynolds on TV, right? But Members Mobile is that for credit unions. It’s a great opportunity for a low-cost, consistent offering where you always know what your price is. And we’re going to grow as this company grows. How do we offer small dollar loans? Could that be a financing market for credit unions? Right now it just kind of happens as part of your phone bill, but maybe that’s an opportunity too.
Sarah Snell Cooke
Even a small dollar loan just to help pay the bill sometimes.
Ben Maxim
Sometimes, yeah.
Sarah Snell Cooke
How does it actually work inside the app? How does someone sign up?
Greg Post
So they see an ad, let’s say on social media, and they click through to our website. But there are really two avenues. There’s the general national marketing campaign to bring new people into credit unions, and then there’s the existing member path where the credit union offers it through their digital channels and members can log into online banking and see it there. Either way, they download the Members Mobile app, the app lets them activate their mobile phone service, and then we have an integration to the credit union either directly or through MeridianLink where they can link their checking account with the mobile phone service and begin receiving the benefits. Existing customers get the $5 monthly cash backs. Brand new customers get the year of free service. And then the credit union can use that app as a digital marketing platform to push relevant messages and offers to the user.
Sarah Snell Cooke
You mentioned the super app idea before we started. How has this been effective in attracting and retaining Gen Z? My kids are ready to bounce from any institution at any time. They don’t really have a primary financial institution.
Ben Maxim
So we are on the cusp of launching. We’re doing internal training, getting a webinar ready, making sure all our employees know what this is so if members call in they know what to do. The retention and onboarding data is yet to be seen, but what we’re drawing from is the adoption of carriers like Mint Mobile and others. What is hard to be fully transparent about is that people pick a phone carrier and they don’t usually switch because it’s hard, unless there’s a real incentive. Some of what we’re trying to capture, being a university-based credit union, is those Gen Zers coming off their parents’ family plans. This is a great opportunity for them to have a $15, $20, $30, or $40 plan depending on how much data they need, with an easy option to switch and start building a little independence. We did a survey and got great results, but this is what people say they’ll do. We want to actually see it. So maybe we can follow up at another event.
Greg Post
We’re launching service in April so we don’t have data from actual users yet. But what really attracted me to this company is the very targeted group of people we’re going after: credit union members and people we can attract to become new credit union members. If we were trying to compete in the mobile phone space and attract general customers, we’d never break through the noise. But when you’re talking to a very targeted audience, you can speak to people about what’s important to them at the right time and place. We strongly believe based on our research that we’re going to be able to attract those customers to both us and credit unions around the country.
Sarah Snell Cooke
Ben, you mentioned enriching data. What is the benefit of that data to a credit union?
Ben Maxim
People spend a lot of time on their phones and we see what they’re searching for. If they’re searching for auto loans, looking at home loans, spending time on Zillow, we can share that data with our partners. We don’t sell data, but we can share it, and then combined with the financial data the credit union already has, you can determine the most relevant product to market to that person. You’re talking about purchase intent because we can gather that behavioral data. These are little computers in our hands and we have access to the operating system data. We can see which apps people spend the most time in, and from that we can understand what life stage moments they might be planning for. We want to balance that carefully. We don’t want to be like the story where Target sent a welcome new mother package to a teenager because they predicted it from shopping habits. But that balance is something we’re going to work through together. In the world of AI, you really can be one to one with all your communication now. You don’t have to build a generic marketing campaign anymore. You can build an individual one on the fly based on real behavioral data. The entire look and feel of the Members Mobile app could change to really support what that person is working toward, and the offers would reflect that. Maybe it’s not just here’s a loan offer, it’s here’s a fintech that can really help you with this part of your life. That’s why we went down this fintech path in the first place.
Sarah Snell Cooke
How did the idea for Members Mobile even come about?
Greg Post Our founders Gary Brandt and Luis Tunan knew each other from a past life. Gary had started an intelligent messaging company and through that got connected with credit unions, and started to understand how they operated and what the challenges were. Luis had launched probably a dozen MVNOs in Europe with Vodafone and managed all of that. They got together and looked at the number of credit unions and credit union members in the US and said this is a significant market. If we can put together a solution to some of the challenges they have, we think we can do something really unique and compelling. This is the first offering of its kind in the US.
Sarah Snell Cooke
When does it launch?
Greg Post
April.
Sarah Snell Cooke
Any projections you’re willing to share?
Greg Post
Not yet. But a year from now we can tell you exactly how it ranked.
Sarah Snell Cooke
I always allow my guests final thoughts. Greg, why don’t we start with you.
Greg Post
We’ve got a dozen credit unions we’re launching with and we’re extremely excited. Our vision and goal is to have a couple of credit unions per state as partners so that when we do our marketing nationwide, people can choose credit unions that are relevant to them where they live. The growth goal is to get to around 100 credit unions across the US and then really see it scale. Most importantly, we want to build on the trust that credit unions already have with their members and have them trust their mobile phone carrier and credit union together, because today that doesn’t always exist with mobile carriers. That’s the unique proposition we really want to offer: something that builds long-term value and trust with their credit union and mobile phone partner together.
Ben Maxim
A lot of credit unions have in the past had access to discounted cell service through their leagues or other channels. This is not that. This is a true experience that you have and own for your members. We can create a nationwide thing. The more credit unions that get involved, it becomes a network effect. There’s a lot more traction and it becomes a better service for all our members. So if you’re interested, learn more. We’re happy to share what we learn as we go through this process.
Sarah Snell Cooke
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time today. Appreciate it.
Greg Post
Thank you.