MUSKEGO, Wis.—As credit unions develop their strategic plans for 2027, one industry executive is urging them to look beyond traditional growth metrics and annual targets and consider a fundamental question: What will make their institutions relevant to members a decade from now?
Chris Felton, president and CEO of Corporate Central, a corporate credit union, believes the answer to that question lies in understanding how technology is changing members’ financial behavior and then adapting business models accordingly. Credit unions that focus on preserving existing processes rather than embracing new technologies and payment infrastructure risk being left behind, he cautions.
Felton shared his insights as part of the CU Daily’s series, “The Growth Imperative,” which is focusing on strategic planning for 2027. His comments appear below.
The CU Daily: As credit unions look to 2027, has the role of the corporate credit union changed? If so, how?
Felton: Absolutely. Historically, corporate credit unions were primarily providers of liquidity, investments, and back-office utilities. Today, the role is far broader. We still provide liquidity, payments, investments, and operational support, but increasingly we serve as a strategic partner and technology enabler.
At Corporate Central, we’ve intentionally evolved into a technology company providing financial services to our members utilizing a modern platform. Our job is to help credit unions compete in a world increasingly shaped by fintechs, instant payments, AI, and digital ecosystems. We are becoming the connective tissue between credit unions, technology providers, and emerging financial infrastructure. Our open-banking, API-driven platform, Beastro, orchestrates these connections and money movement.
The CU Daily: What did you hear primarily from your clients/member CUs during 2026? Did anything surprise you?
Felton: Three topics dominated conversations in 2026: growth, AI, and payments/fraud.
Credit unions want to know how to attract younger members, deepen relationships with existing members, improve efficiency, and compete with increasingly sophisticated fintech companies. They are also looking for practical guidance on AI, fraud mitigation, instant payments, and digital asset strategy.
What surprised me was how quickly the conversations with some credit unions shifted from “Should we explore AI?” to “How do we operationalize AI?”, while many others are just now starting to explore how they might use AI.
The CU Daily: If you could put one item on the agenda for strategic planning meetings this fall, what would it be and why?
Felton: I would put one question on every agenda: “What will make us relevant to a member 10 years from now?”
Too many strategic plans focus on preserving today’s business model. Growth rarely comes from protecting the past. It comes from creating future relevance.
Technology, payments, AI, and digital assets are changing how people interact with money. Institutions that understand how member behavior is evolving will grow. Institutions focused solely on protecting today’s processes will struggle.
Measuring Depth
The CU Daily: Is growth a frequent subject of discussion? What is misunderstood about growth, and what is the most important growth metric to watch?
Felton: Growth is one of the most discussed topics across the credit union industry. The biggest misconception is that growth equals asset growth. Asset growth without engagement, relevance, or profitability can be misleading.
The metric I watch most closely is relationship depth. At Corporate Central, one measure is products per member. For natural-person credit unions, I would focus on active member engagement and share of wallet. Growth is more sustainable when members use more services, not simply when balances rise.
The CU Daily: How do you monitor what’s taking place in the fintech space?
Felton: We monitor fintech innovation from multiple angles. We participate in industry groups, fintech investment networks, accelerator programs, conferences such as Money20/20, VentureTech, Finnovate, and others. We are also members/owners of Circuit, investors in Curql, and sponsors of Filene’s Center of Excellence, and we maintain ongoing relationships with founders, investors, and technology companies.
More importantly, we don’t just watch fintechs. We have our own fintech with our CUSO Emergifi. Emergifi is building future solutions with other fintechs. That provides a much better understanding of where the market is going than reading headlines.
The CU Daily: Where have you found room to squeeze out costs?
Felton: The largest opportunity has not been traditional expense reduction. It has been removing friction. We’ve focused on automation, data consolidation, platform simplification, AI-assisted workflows, and reducing duplicate systems. The goal is not simply lower cost; it is increasing capacity and revenue without proportionally increasing staff or infrastructure.
The CU Daily: Where will you focus strategically in 2027?
Felton: Three areas: 1) AI-driven productivity and intelligence, 2) real-time and multi-rail payments, and 3) digital assets and tokenization infrastructure.
All three are connected. The institutions that move information, money, and decisions faster will have an enormous competitive advantage over the next decade.
A Formal AI Strategy
The CU Daily: How has Corporate Central used AI this year, and how does it plan to use AI in 2027? Do you have an AI strategy?
Felton: Yes, we have a formal AI strategy/vision and board-adopted AI policy. Our policy explicitly states that AI use is expected and encouraged as part of normal business operations and all job descriptions now require AI skills as table stakes.
In 2026 we deployed Copilot organization-wide and developed AI use cases spanning compliance, fraud monitoring, marketing, member research, knowledge management, and product support. We are also developing AI capabilities within Beastro. Our software development team utilizes several AI models to create agents to assist with code development and testing. However, we still employ humans to verify before anything is placed into production.
In 2027, the focus shifts from adoption to embedded intelligence. AI will increasingly operate through agents and workflows rather than standalone tools.
The CU Daily: How are clients/member CUs using AI? How should they use it?
Felton: Most credit unions started with productivity use cases: policy research, content generation, meeting summaries, and workflow automation.
The next phase should focus on business outcomes. Fraud detection, member retention, lending intelligence, operational efficiency, and personalized member engagement offer the greatest long-term value.
My advice is simple: don’t start with technology. Start with a business problem or need and let AI become part of the solution.
The CU Daily: AI-driven fraud is becoming an increasing problem. What is Corporate Central doing about it?
Felton: Fraud is becoming more sophisticated because AI lowers the cost and increases the scale of attacks.
Our strategy combines technology, behavioral analytics, governance, training, and information-sharing. We are investing in AI-enhanced fraud detection, transaction monitoring, and intelligence capabilities while helping member credit unions strengthen their controls.
The best defense remains layered: technology, process, and educated employees and members. As our IT Director has always said, “No matter how much money we spend to protect our systems, it only takes one employee to click on the wrong link.” We train and test our employees relentlessly.
The CU Daily: Are many of your conversations related to payments?
Felton: Yes, more than ever. Credit unions want to understand FedNow, RTP, instant payments, stablecoin, tokenized deposits, digital wallets, emerging settlement rails, fraud implications, and future payment economics.
Our strategy is to become the orchestration layer and facilitator that connects credit unions to whatever payment rail or payment technology becomes relevant, rather than betting on a single winner.
The CU Daily: What direction does Corporate Central provide regarding stablecoins, tokenization, and blockchain-based payments?
Felton: Our message is consistent: don’t confuse speculation with infrastructure.
We are not focused on launching a coin. We are focused on helping credit unions understand custody, exchange, tokenized deposits, settlement, and interoperability. We believe collaboration will outperform isolated experimentation.
The question isn’t whether blockchain will matter. The question is how credit unions maintain relevance if new payment rails emerge around them. The financial services and payments environment is going through unprecedented rapid change. There is no survival strategy that allows you to sit and see where things will settle out because things aren’t going to settle due to the speed of evolving technology.
The CU Daily: Is Corporate Central doing or planning anything else that should be highlighted?
Felton: The biggest story is that we’re positioning Corporate Central and our credit union members for the next generation of financial infrastructure.
That includes expanding Beastro as a unified platform, growing instant payments capabilities, integrating AI throughout the organization, strengthening our CUSO ecosystem, and exploring digital asset infrastructure in ways that support the entire credit union movement
The growth imperative is not simply getting bigger. It’s becoming more valuable. That’s where we’re focused.
Reporting by By Anne Battle Schultz
