A fintech company just made their newest product completely free.
Not free-for-90-days free. Not free-with-a-massive-catch free. Actually, genuinely, permanently free.
Fuse—the AI-powered loan origination platform that’s raised $25M from the same investors backing Chime and OpenAI—just dropped Fuse AI POS, the first AI-generated point of sale system built specifically for credit unions. And they’re giving away the core product to every credit union. Forever.
Yeah, we had to read that twice too.
The Vendor Contract Nightmare Is Finally Over
Let’s be honest about how Point of Sale procurement has worked for the past few decades. You’d sign a multi-year contract based on projections someone pulled out of thin air, ROI calculations built on “trust us bro” assumptions, and annual minimums that locked you in before you could prove the thing actually worked. Credit unions weren’t buying software—they were making expensive blind bets with member money and crossing their fingers.
It was a terrible system. And according to Fuse cofounder Andres Klaric, it’s done.
“Every monopoly in history has ended the same way,” Klaric said. “Not because regulators intervened. Not because incumbents lost their nerve. Because someone figured out how to build the same thing for a fraction of the cost and had the conviction to price it accordingly.”
He’s not pulling punches: “Credit unions have been carrying a weight that was never theirs to carry. The vendors who put it there were not building defensible businesses. They were borrowing time. That time is up.”
How AI Made This Possible (And Why It Matters)
Fuse’s bread and butter is still their loan origination system. But they built Fuse POS using AI and decided to give it away because, well, they could. And because credit union members—teachers, nurses, factory workers—deserve better than waiting months through a procurement circus just to get a car loan.
Here’s where it gets cool. Fuse POS is built and maintained by AI. You literally just drop in your credit union’s email address. The AI finds your website, grabs your logo, matches your brand colors, reads your loan types, and generates a fully branded, mobile-ready member application portal. The whole thing takes about five minutes.
No IT team required. No scoping calls. No contract negotiations that drag on longer than a Marvel movie.
Test Everything, Commit to Nothing
Once your portal is live, you can layer on premium features one at a time: Plaid bank account connections, AI document reading, one-click direct deposit switching. Each add-on works on a pay-as-you-go model at a few bucks per application.
Want to test something? Turn it on. Run it on a handful of loans. Check if the ROI is real. If it works, keep it. If it doesn’t, flip it off. Done.
No budget committee meetings. No multi-year commitments. No defending last quarter’s projections to people who weren’t even in the room when you made them.
“The old model forced you to calculate ROI before you had a single data point,” said Marc Escapa, Fuse’s other cofounder. “You signed a contract based on a vendor’s spreadsheet and your own best guess. We built the opposite. The portal is live in five minutes. The add-ons cost a few dollars per application. You test them on real loans and you decide.”
Translation: Fuse takes the risk, not you. Which is kind of how it should have worked all along.
They’re Putting Their Money Where Their Mouth Is
This isn’t Fuse’s first rodeo with this philosophy. Earlier this year, they launched a $5 million Rescue Fund to help credit unions escape bad legacy contracts. Apparently, the response was massive—turns out when you remove financial barriers, credit unions actually move pretty fast.
Fuse POS is that same energy applied to an entirely new product category.
“The category as it exists today doesn’t make sense anymore,” Escapa said. “The cost structure that justified it is gone. We’re not disrupting this market. We’re just being honest about what it was always going to become.”
He makes a solid point: “Credit unions serve people who need every basis point. Every dollar we take out of the vendor stack goes back to those members. That’s the only moat worth building.”
Why This Feels Inevitable
The credit union movement started with a simple idea: everyone deserves access to fair financial services, regardless of who they are or where they live. For three decades, tech vendors have quietly charged credit unions a premium to actually act on that mission.
But the math just changed.
Generative AI has demolished the cost of building, deploying, and maintaining enterprise-grade software. We’re talking an order of magnitude cheaper. That shift was always going to produce a company willing to pass those savings directly to the institutions serving everyday people.
Fuse decided to be that company. And honestly? It was probably only a matter of time before someone did.
The question now isn’t whether this model makes sense. It’s why anyone would go back to the old way.