WASHINGTON–Additional details have been shared around the just-announced initiative to build a foundational AI resource for credit unions called Cultivate that is trained directly on credit union industry content, information and resources.
As the CU Daily announced here, Filene Research Institute, Vertice AI and Vizo Financial have joined to form CUltivate, which will provide that AI model that credit unions will be able to access.
During the Filene Chairman’s Breakfast during GAC, Mitch Rutledge, CEO and co-founder of Vertice AI, and Fred Eisel, president and CEO of Vizo Financial, shared a deeper dive into what the new technology AI platform will offer to credit unions.
Rutledge said the traditional process for gathering much of the information CU leaders need can take significant amounts of time.
“The old way of doing this would be going to many websites, maybe calling some peer credit unions to see what they’re doing, trying to find filing research around best practices,” Rutledge said. “That could take hours, days, potentially weeks.”
Cultivate, he said, is designed to distill regulatory guidance, policy decisions and research into what Rutledge described as a five-minute conversation.
“With Cultivate, that will take minutes,” he said. “A simple conversation will distill NCUA regulations, policy decisions, best practices and filing research into a five-minute conversation so you can understand the needs and wants from a trusted set of sources.”
Rutledge emphasized that Cultivate is not a general-purpose chatbot or a search engine layered onto an internal knowledge base. Instead, he described it as a “movement-wide intelligence engine” built specifically for the credit union system.
‘It Will Get Smarter’
“It will get smarter as you all engage with it over time,” he said.
According to Rutledge, the platform incorporates vetted content from trusted industry sources, including NCUA materials, credit union filings and research from organizations such as Filene Research Institute. He said peer contributions will be reviewed by credit union experts rather than by large technology companies.
“It’s not big tech in California deciding what’s important for you,” Rutledge said.
He added that the system includes a proprietary personally identifiable information (PPI) detection engine designed to prevent sensitive data from being shared inappropriately.
Rutledge also said the platform offers transparency into what it has been trained on — a feature he contrasted with large public AI models. “You’ll know what people are asking and what it’s been trained on,” he said.
A ‘Ton of Sense’
Fred Eisel, president and CEO of Vizo Financial Corporate Credit Union, told the Filene audience the developers behind Cultivate have demonstrated an ability to move quickly while maintaining a strong understanding of the credit union system.
“They work fast, they solve items very fast, they’re very quick to market, but they understand the industry extremely well,” he said.
Artificial intelligence adoption is accelerating across financial services, Eisel noted, with many large credit unions already investing heavily in their own internal AI tools and knowledge bases. But he said smaller and mid-sized institutions often lack the staff and financial resources to build such systems independently.
“For the small- to mid-sized credit union that doesn’t have the resources and can’t hire the resources, AI in general — and Cultivate specifically — changes the game,” Eisel said. “AI makes you so much more efficient. You have to embrace it.”
Closed Knowledge Environment
He described Cultivate as a shared, closed knowledge environment owned collectively by participating credit unions, and he compared the model to similar efforts in healthcare, citing a physician-focused platform developed by the Mayo Clinic that enables clinicians nationwide to collaborate using a protected, shared database.
“Every industry right now is doing the same exact thing,” he said. “If any industry is going to collaborate and work together and share knowledge, this is the industry.”
By combining research, regulatory data and credit union-generated policies and procedures into a trusted system, Eisel said the platform is designed to help employees access reliable information more efficiently while maintaining data security.
“A trusted, closed system is hugely important,” he said.
