Achieva Credit Union is taking a deliberate, security-first approach to AI, prioritizing member protection over rapid deployment. 

“We’re being very intentional about how we bring AI in,” Chief Technology Officer Tracy Ingram told FinAi News.  

The Dunedin, Fla.-based credit union is targeting AI at “manual, repetitive work” and routine requests, using the technology to “pull information faster” for staff.

One use involves demystifying the credit union industry’s notorious jargon, Ingram said. 

Achieva is “using AI to provide information on acronyms,” Ingram said, calling it a way to bring knowledge “to their fingertips in a much more pointed, concise way.” 

The $4 billion credit union also is exploring virtual assistants for call representative teams to help answer members’ questions more quickly, she said. 

Ingram said security underpins every decision. Achieva employs a rigorous vetting process before adopting any tool, including a “scoring mechanism on what we focus on first,” she said. 

On agentic coding tools such as OpenClaw, which several financial institutions have banned, Ingram said staff “don’t have access to these tools through any of our Achieva systems,” with policies and system controls limiting access to approved solutions. 

The company uses Microsoft tools including Copilot for all its AI needs, but constantly evaluates vendors that can help deploy new AI solutions to make operations more efficient, she said. 

Investing in Payfinia 

The AI push runs parallel to Achieva’s seven-figure investment in payments firm Payfinia on April 21, which has an open payments engine that routes transactions across Fed Now and Real Time Payment rails, she said. 

Keith Riddle, chief executive officer at Payfinia, told FinAi News that the partnership gives the credit union “a seat at the table for really shaping the future of payments.” 

There is a huge demand from credit unions when it comes to a payments hub that uses machine learning to route payments through the best options available, Riddle said, adding that fighting fraud with AI is another major use case of AI in payments. 

“Our platform has a broad degree of controls,” Riddle said. “We call them layered fraud controls, like [the] number of times I can send a payment, the dollar amount maximum for new clients, a cool-off period where AI and machine learning pause continuous payments in short time.” 

Some FIs have reported as much as a 70% reduction in fraud rates, Riddle said, adding that it is too early to provide a number on how much efficiency Achieva will gain from the tool. 

Payfinia, a consortium of 30 credit unions, also is developing agentic AI payments frameworks because many FIs are inquiring about the tool, he said. 

“I think as they continue to pursue agentic commerce, that will look at ways in which we’ll probably have more agentic [in] commerce enablement [as well as] the agentic fraud mitigation as part of that,” he said. 

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