Credit Unions Build Cloud Data Strategy to Stay Competitive

Watch more: What’s Next in Payments With Velera’s Cody Banks

The payments environment facing credit unions in 2026 reflects a subtle yet consequential shift in emphasis, as competitive pressures, member expectations and technological capabilities converge around a single organizing principle.

For Cody Banks, senior vice president of Product Experience and Enablement at credit union service organization Velera, that principle can be captured in one word.

“My word [for the year] is intelligence,” Banks said during a discussion for the February edition of the What’s Next in Payments series, “Word of the Year.”

Banks’ framing does not treat intelligence as shorthand for artificial intelligence or analytics tools alone. Instead, it describes a broader institutional posture grounded in how financial institutions interpret data, automate decisions and anticipate member needs throughout the lifecycle of a transaction.

Intelligence increasingly defines how credit unions compete, how members evaluate their financial experiences and how operational decisions are made, Banks said.

“I think it is going to be a catalyst for where consumers are already expecting those personalized experiences,” he said.

That expectation raises a question for issuers, he said, particularly as digital interactions replace many traditional banking touchpoints: “What are we still asking consumers to do or decide that we could actually handle for them, or that we could nudge in their place?”

Credit unions are seeing structural changes. Faster payments adoption, evolving settlement models and declining tolerance for legacy processes are collectively altering how liquidity moves through the system. When it comes to faster payments, Banks said, “we are seeing more and more institutions set up to receive.”

Although he acknowledged that send-side adoption remains uneven, Banks pointed to expanding use cases that illustrate the practical implications of real-time disbursement and settlement.

The shift is no longer theoretical, he said. It is increasingly visible in everyday financial interactions.

“If anyone is following the Fed, we are seeing a few of those use cases emerge on insurance disbursements,” he said, offering the hypothetical example where, “I totaled my car and now I want to get that replaced immediately, without having to wait several days for a check to arrive in the mail.”

The consequences extend beyond consumer convenience. Faster payments can materially alter cash flow management for small businesses operating on narrow margins, where timing differences translate directly into operational flexibility, Banks said.

“Let’s say you have a restaurant operating on a low cash margin,” he said. “They receive an invoice due at the end of the month. As we move further into faster, real-time payments, they can wait to pay that invoice on the actual due date. That helps cash flow.”

For businesses relying on 1% and 2% margins, those timing differences can go a long way toward shoring up financial stability, he said.

Central to Banks’ argument is the recognition that credit unions are not facing a data scarcity problem. The challenge lies in governance, integration and synthesis. He identified a series of foundational questions that increasingly define institutional readiness. These questions often determine whether intelligence initiatives remain fragmented experiments or evolve into operational capabilities.

“You want to engage experiences directed at particular members or demographics,” he said. “It is really about following those use cases, understanding what you are trying to achieve, and then mapping where the data resides.”

Banks pointed to emerging models centered on intelligent offers and behavioral nudges, including financial wellness prompts that respond to observable patterns rather than static segmentation.

Operationalizing intelligence is inseparable from the modernization of the technology stack, Banks said. Data orchestration, predictive modeling and real-time decisioning require infrastructure capable of supporting continuous integration and rapid deployment.

Credit unions are navigating a transition away from traditional on-premises infrastructure toward cloud-based architectures designed to integrate data streams from cores, processors and digital channels, he said.

There are many valuable points of data, whether through online banking, the core, the processor or other vendors, Banks said. Vendor selection, in that context, becomes less about individual features and more about interoperability, integration capacity and long-term adaptability.

Banks linked intelligence directly to fraud mitigation and decision automation, areas where real-time environments compress the window for intervention. As transactions accelerate, so too does the need for systems capable of evaluating risk, intent and context instantaneously.

Looking ahead, he suggested that success for credit unions will be defined by their ability to move from experimentation to scaled execution.

“If we are able to say that institutions took some of those intelligent experiences and began externalizing them, that they moved from pilot programs to operationalizing real-time decisions, mitigating fraud and adding more personalized offers, that would represent … what success looks like,” Banks said.

Those capabilities increasingly represent competitive differentiators, rather than optional enhancements, he said.

“The winners in payments are not going to be the fastest or the cheapest or the least risky,” Banks told PYMNTS. “They will be the smartest.”

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