Artificial intelligence is moving quickly across financial services. The challenge has not been interest but trust and even where to begin.
That tension sits at the center of a conversation between Sarah Snell Cooke and Anthony Volpe at the America’s Credit Unions Governmental Affairs Conference. Anthony introduces CUltivate, a newly launched CUSO created through a partnership between Vertice AI, Vizo Financial and Filene Research Institute. Their goal is to build foundational AI designed specifically for credit unions and powered by the collective knowledge of the credit union community.
Rather than adapting generic tools built for big tech or large banks, CUltivate is designed to give credit unions access to industry-specific intelligence while allowing them to contribute their own insights and expertise along the way. Anthony explains, “The cooperative nature of this industry makes it well-suited for something like this.”
Instead of each institution trying to figure out AI on its own, the idea behind CUltivate is shared learning. A credit union could access its own knowledge while also benefiting from insights drawn from across the industry. And rather than rushing toward member-facing chatbots, the early emphasis looks internally, helping employees access knowledge faster and better understand credit union trends.
The discussion makes it clear: This is less about chasing the AI hype cycle and more about the cooperative model applied to a new kind of technology.
NOTE: If the AI that spewed out this transcript were a chef, we’d all be eating cereal for dinner.
Sarah Cooke
America’s Governmental Affairs conference, 2026 I am joined today by Anthony Volpe, welcome.
Anthony Volpe
Thank you for having me.
Sarah Cooke
And you guys just started a brand new CUSO.
Anthony Volpe
That’s correct. So we started, I’ll let you introduce it. Yes, we started cultivate, which was officially announced today. We had a press release earlier this week. And cultivate is a CUSO started by Vertice AI, Vizo Financial and Filene, and our mission is to really unite the movement and build our own foundational AI so that we can really guide and distribute the technology that credit unions need as they go forward in the AI space.
Sarah Cooke
Yeah, I had the good fortune to speak with the CEO of Vertice AI last night, so I got a preview.
Anthony Volpe
I was a co founder with Mitch on Vertice, yeah, and what is now being called cultivate, was something we were working on as part of Vertice, and realized that the potential is limited unless we could really bring everyone together and use the collective knowledge and information of all the credit unions, or many credit unions to do so, and so the best way to ensure that would happen is to spin it out, make it a CUSO partner with Filene, which has this unmatched reputation for providing trustworthy research and acknowledging best practices and identifying how people can do things better, along with Vizo and Vizo financial, of course, is the providing capital which is required for any of this. But Vizo has two other really important characteristics which made them attractive partners for us, the first being, they have a very creative and innovative leadership team, and their CEO, Fred Eisel, is very concerned about how they deliver value to their member credit unions, which I think is very important. And then secondly, they have this network of nearly 1000 credit unions that can reach out, take on early versions of the technology help us make it through early betas and other things as we build it.
Sarah Cooke
Yeah, and I love how a lot of the new FinTech’s are starting CUSOs, yes, so that they can better serve credit unions, as opposed to credit unions taking off the shelf or what the banks want or whatever, because that can be a huge difference, even then in technology, credit unions and banks kind of operationally the same. But when you apply their philosophy to that technology, is when it when it makes a difference, I think, yeah. And so when did you officially launched?
Anthony Volpe
Yeah, we had a press release earlier this week, and then we announced at the filing GAC breakfast, breakfast this morning. So it’s out there now, and so it’s full throttle, right?
Sarah Cooke
Yeah, absolutely. And so what types of credit unions are you looking for to, like, do this beta, right?
Anthony Volpe
So initially our target segment will be, you know, 2 billion and below, probably no larger credit unions could use. And the reason we say that is because the credit union leadership is rightfully cautious of some of the challenges of the big public, big tech AI right in particular, we have trust issues, we have transparency issues, we have member privacy issues, and so by overcoming those, we think that we Give especially the mid size and smaller credit unions, a way to move forward when they’ve, in many cases, kind of been stymied, and getting over that inertia is much easier if you have these characteristics. So at first that and they’ll be using a normal chat like interface to hopefully increase the productivity and the quality of service that each employee in their credit union can provide.
Sarah Cooke
And it’s focused specifically on credit unions, only, credit union specific to credit unions, and then specific even more to that credit.
Anthony Volpe
That’s right, yes, and a credit union will have access to their own knowledge, but also the knowledge of the industry and very purpose built tools that complement the knowledge base and other things. So it’s not just a knowledge base, it’s that and so many more things. And eventually, the largest credit unions will also benefit. We see we have an API associated with the tool that will allow them to connect cultivate with other AI based applications that they’re already investing in right their own internal dev teams can utilize it in their own internal development. So there’s a number of use cases that even the largest credit unions will eventually, we believe, start to use.
Sarah Cooke
Start to use. This is the technology that I. Know, the big banks, the big the big ones, have yes and being able to level that playing field, and credit unions are able to help shape it, yes too. Yes. It’s very important. Yes. Talk a little bit about that.
Anthony Volpe
You know, only the largest institutions can really do this, both from an affordability point of view, from the know how point of view, and then from the knowledge point of you, what everyone here can really benefit from is the sharing of that data, of course, but also because of the technology obstacles that it can be we think that, you know, the cooperative nature of this industry makes it well suited, right? The best analog to cultivate elsewhere is in the medical space. And so while we know healthcare systems compete and insurers compete clinicians at the level of patient care, they really care and they are cooperative. And so it’s not surprising that open evidence really demonstrated to us what’s possible. So what open evidence did was they said, Yes, physicians are trying to use chatgpt, but they’re not continuing to do it because of trust reasons. And so they made their own industry focused a much narrower model that really trained on data from the New England Journal of Medicine and the journals of American Medical Association. And that really changed the quality of the output, the response the bots were giving, and it made it trustworthy. And so that’s really what we’re trying to mimic here. And we’re hopeful that we have the same type of growth that they’ve seen.
Sarah Cooke
I know for decades, they’ve talked about having a repository for all the creating policies and stuff for everybody to share. Yes, and this has made it so much easier now, yeah, didn’t have AI readily available 20 years ago, right?
Anthony Volpe
You could always share it, but that didn’t really it was always one on one, yeah. Now, what do you do if, even if you have it shared, can we learn from it? Can we provide insights to others? Hey, you have a great policy. However, have you considered these factors that we see present elsewhere? And those are the types of things, certainly policy and regulatory types of things. But there’s content creation, there’s understanding macroeconomic situations and variables, et cetera. So endless number of use cases we love to demonstrate a community impact type of knowledge that would help community leaders think through. Hey, here are good ideas that have worked elsewhere. Why isn’t our credit union doing that? So really, no matter the employee, we’re offering them a way to get better.
Sarah Cooke
Yeah, it’s like optimizing credit unions. Yeah, we hope so essentially, yeah.
Anthony Volpe
Again, this is foundation AI on its own without further development in other directions. It can’t be the be all, end all for everything. I don’t want to mischaracterize things, but it is going to provide something better than what we have today, which is very uneven adoption, very little adoption. As we look at 4200 credit unions, this hopefully will, will solve some of those issues.
Sarah Cooke
It’s not necessarily member facing it’s in this correct?
Anthony Volpe
There’s no member facing interface as of now, and we don’t expect to get that to some for some time. And yeah, right, right. There are a variety of other tools that might be better suited for that.
Sarah Cooke
Yeah, yeah. And I know credit unions, especially board members, tend to think, and it’s easier for the lay people Chatbot. That’s like, the easiest way to think of it, yes, but there’s so many more, especially on the back office type stuff, yeah, yeah. And anyway, so how, how are cardigans going to connect with you? Like, how do you work with them?
Anthony Volpe
Well, first and foremost, this doesn’t require a big enterprise deployment like so many of the AIS that we feel right. This isn’t let’s ponder a decision for weeks and months and see 10 demos and then eventually agree to do it and then spend months taking data from the core. And it’s not like at all. This is literally the way we as consumers have tried to use things like chatgpt, let’s go to the website and let’s check it out. And so ultimately, we want it to be that easy. We’ll allow credit unions to contribute as much data as they’re willing, but they don’t have to get started. And I think that would be a big advantage, being able to, you know, sign up online with us and connect that way and get things going. We talk about transparency as one of the big benefits, and by transparency, there’s transparency in the training data, but there’s more importantly, to your question, transparency in how others are using it, and that allows us to shape a roadmap that is really compelling based on clever uses that others are uncovering, and this also gives us a way to think through, how are we going to propagate best practices? We’ll do that, and we have the best partner you can have in Filene to help do that, right? So looking at the data, we found, look these 13 credit unions are using in a way we never had even imagined. And we. Think all 1000 of you should be doing this, right? So that’s kind of the goal.
Sarah Cooke
Yeah, right, yeah. So what would you like to leave our credit union audience with today?
Anthony Volpe
There’s a lot of AI out there, and again, I fully understand the caution, the caution that is being shown by the leaders is really just keeping in touch with the ethos of the industry, right? It’s member money that they’re investing. They want to be careful. It’s member data, and they owe it to members to be to secure it. So though some suggest that they’re behind, I suggest that they’re being cautious, but this is the way to check the first three boxes and say, Okay, now I understand those things and how they’re being handled. We can start moving. And I believe the leadership in this industry will do that.
Sarah Cooke
Yeah, absolutely. I think we’ve finished that educational piece. Now let’s jump into it next time. Thank you so much for your time today.
Anthony Volpe
Take care. Bye.