When a Michigan State University Federal Credit Union member clicks on a personal loan for debt consolidation on the credit union’s website, they are actually entering a Happy Money powered experience. Most of them have no idea. And that is kind of the point.
Matt Tomko, CRO at Happy Money, joined Sarah Snell Cooke of The Credit Union Connection live at GAC 2026 to talk about the consumer finance platform’s evolving partnership model with credit unions and what a 5x lift in marketing campaign performance looks like when you stop using your own brand and start using theirs instead.
Happy Money’s partnership with Michigan State has taken the member relationship a step further. Happy Money built custom marketing materials using the credit union’s brand imagery, went out to Michigan State’s member list, identified the members who would most benefit from a consolidation loan using credit bureau data and ran a campaign. Sixty days into the pilot, the early reads are strong, the member feedback is positive and the volume is not cannibalizing loans the credit union was already making.
What makes the model worth watching longer term is where Tomko says it is heading. Happy Money is already exploring how to introduce other credit union products, checking accounts, high-yield savings and others into the loan application flow while they have the member’s attention. Anecdotally, the credit unions they work with are seeing strong cross-sell success, particularly on checking accounts, once a member comes in through a personal loan.
The personal loan is the door. Everything else follows. And for credit unions trying to reach members who are actively shopping for loans on sites like Credit Karma, Experian or NerdWallet, Happy Money’s long-standing affiliate relationships are a channel most individual credit unions simply cannot access on their own.
NOTE: The AI behind this transcript has a bright future ahead—just not in accurate speech recognition.
Sarah Snell Cooke
Hello, welcome everyone. We’re live and we are here with Matt Tomko. Welcome.
Matt Tomko
Thank you. Good to see you again.
Sarah Snell Cooke
Good to see you. Give us a little introduction of yourself and the company. Happy Money, I should say that first.
Matt Tomko
Sure. Matt Tomko, I’m the chief revenue officer at Happy Money. Happy Money is a consumer finance platform. We primarily specialize in personal loans for debt consolidation and we partner with credit unions, selling those loans on a forward flow basis.
Sarah Snell Cooke
What are you seeing in the embedded finance movement?
Matt Tomko
For us, the partnership has always been important because credit unions are the primary funding vehicle for our loans. But as we’ve moved forward and developed these partnerships and tried to come up with more customized solutions, we recognized that the embedded finance play is very important. Credit unions have memberships with extremely strong loyalty, and those brands are extremely important in the communities they serve. So it’s a natural evolution for us to leverage that to help credit unions deepen the memberships they have, generate new loans, and hopefully provide a better product to their members. We recently announced a partner-based solution. We piloted it with one of our most important credit union partners, Michigan State University Federal Credit Union. We rolled that out, and we’re now marketing using their brand to their members and embedding into their user experience to provide the personal loan experience to their membership.
Sarah Snell Cooke
Explain a little bit more about how it works.
Matt Tomko
We collaborated with Michigan State and developed marketing materials, both physical direct mail and digital. They provided us with their member list. We went out to our credit bureau partners and identified which members would most benefit from a consolidation loan. Then we ran an outbound marketing campaign to their members using their brand imagery and tested it against our own. There’s no surprise: it pulled a lot better than ours did. It has been a success in the pilot. We’ve deepened relationships with their membership. They are also big fans of our product. We’ve worked with them for a long time, the loans perform well, and the customer experience is one of the best in the industry. So they replaced their debt consolidation personal loan page on their website with essentially an API call to us. If you go to the Michigan State member website and click on a personal loan for consolidation, it is actually powered by Happy Money. It is all disclosed and transparent. It is still Michigan State imagery on the landing page, but you are going through a Happy Money based experience. At the end of the process, the loan is funded by Michigan State. In this relationship we service the loans and maintain that transparency throughout, so the member always knows they are a member of Michigan State even though Happy Money is the one servicing their loan.
Sarah Snell Cooke
Member experience is becoming more and more important than almost anything else. As long as your rates are competitive, that relationship piece really matters. Talk a little bit about what you are seeing there.
Matt Tomko
We pride ourselves on being approachable and meeting customers where they are. Through our Hive platform, which encompasses originations, servicing, and even participation for other credit unions, we have introduced tools to make everything as seamless as possible. Members can self-service as much as they want, but when they need us, we are always there through whatever channel they choose. It is a combination of efficiency tools, some AI based, but a lot of it is just partnering with outsourcing agencies and using our internal team for the more complex conversations.
Sarah Snell Cooke
How has the experience been with Michigan State? I know they pilot a lot of things.
Matt Tomko
They do. April and her team are fantastic. It has been great. They are a really forward-thinking partner. Their willingness to use our experience and embed it has been good. We have seen strong uptake from the membership. It has only been about 60 days since we went to market with it, but the early reads are really strong and the feedback from members has been positive. From what we understand from the Michigan State team, it is incremental volume and deepening of relationships. It is a product they have offered for quite some time, but we went out with a couple of marketing campaigns and originated a lot of new deeper relationships.
Sarah Snell Cooke
What are some of the results you are seeing?
Matt Tomko
Without going into too many specifics, we are seeing about a 5x lift in efficiency from the marketing campaigns we have run using their brand in their footprint compared to what we would see from a traditional Happy Money branded campaign or what Michigan State was doing on their own. It is providing significant lift.
Sarah Snell Cooke
What does the implementation process look like for a credit union?
Matt Tomko
It is relatively simple. First and foremost the credit union needs to be a funding partner of ours, which is generally a 30 to 90 day process depending on complexity. For standing up the marketing piece, we can move as fast as our credit union partner can. Our internal marketing team builds all the creative. We do all the heavy lifting. We really just need approval from the credit union that we are using their brand and marks in the appropriate way. Our internal development team builds all the landing pages and the seamless experience when a member comes from the credit union’s link over to our ecosystem to complete the loan. The main things we need from the credit union are the member list if we are going to market directly to their members, and approval on all the collateral we are building.
Sarah Snell Cooke
There seems to be a shift happening where credit unions want to do more with fewer vendors rather than having a different partner for every single thing. Are you seeing that?
Matt Tomko
A little bit. We are still very much focused on personal loans as the one product we offer, but we are looking for ways to expand on those relationships. Can we introduce other products our credit union partners offer, like high yield savings and checking, into our application flow? You have the member’s attention during a captive application experience. There are several other things we should be able to introduce and be that co-brand vehicle by which the credit union’s products get into their members’ hands.
Sarah Snell Cooke When you talk about deepening relationships, where is that heading in terms of products per member?
Matt Tomko We are leading with the personal loan as either an entry vehicle or a way to deepen an existing relationship, and then looking to use our access points to introduce the other products the credit union offers. Anecdotally, the credit unions we work with are having a very high success rate introducing members to other products once we bring them in through a personal loan. Checking seems to be the one with the most cross-sell success. The real opportunity is not just that first debt consolidation loan. The unlock comes from being active once the member is onboarded and introducing them to other products. That is where the larger value is.
Sarah Snell Cooke
And you are doing the marketing for them, which is a nice thing to have taken off your plate.
Matt Tomko
Yes, and we have access to channels that are unique and that individual credit unions do not always get access to. The digital affiliates are the big one. Most lenders make up probably half of their originations through those channels. They buy up all the search terms and in the age of AI and agentic search, they are on the cutting edge. For an individual credit union, getting a presence on any of those affiliate sites is very difficult. We have had those relationships for a long time and spend a significant amount of time and money optimizing them. Giving our credit union partners access to customers who are already shopping for a personal loan on those platforms is really valuable. One of the next steps in the evolution of this is that when we can identify a member in a certain geography showing up through Credit Karma, Experian, or NerdWallet, we want to deliver them back to their credit union if they choose that offer on the marketplace. If a member recognizes their credit union on that site, we think that is going to be really powerful.
Sarah Snell Cooke
Final thoughts. What would you like to leave our credit union audience with today?
Matt Tomko
We are really excited about introducing this partner-based approach. We think it can be really valuable in deepening member relationships and helping members be a little more sticky as we round out the wallet. We are very customizable and easy to work with, and happy to introduce additional partners to our product if they are interested.
Sarah Snell Cooke
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time. Appreciate it.