Patelco Credit Union has invested in Payfinia and is working with the company to improve its real-time payments infrastructure and develop agentic AI tools to better serve its members. 

“When someone comes to you to interact with your products and services, they need to go through the best experience possible,” Kal Majmundar, chief technology and transformation officer at Patelco Credit Union, told FinAi News.

“They should not have to second guess.” 

Working with Payfinia allows Patelco to provide payments infrastructure, such as real-time payments, that members can use intuitively in their banking app or online banking, Majmundar said.  

The credit union has been working with Payfinia for nearly two years, supporting its user experience and watching it innovate to stay competitive in a fast-changing tech environment.  

As a result, Patelco invested an undisclosed amount in Payfinia this month to drive the relationship deeper, Majmundar said. 

AI at Payfinia 

While real-time payments are becoming table stakes for FIs, Payfinia is gearing up to build tools that are AI native, Chief Executive Keith Riddle told FinAi News. 

“A lot of the agentic commerce capabilities that are being discussed in the marketplace today are more acquirer-oriented,” Riddle said. “We’re actually looking at the inverse of that.” 

Payfinia aims to develop agentic AI platforms that allow issuer FIs to have greater control over agentic payments flowing through their rails, Riddle said. This allows FIs to provide agentic payments infrastructure to merchants, rather than figure out how to embed a merchant’s agentic systems into the FI’s platform.  

Having credit unions and regional FIs as its investors and board members helps Payfinia develop tools that FIs can use, he added. 

“We are evaluating the strategic opportunity associated with [agentic payments], which then [Majmundar] and other board members will have an opportunity to provide feedback on and ensuring that we’re going to be aligned with [their plans],” Riddle said. 

Payfinia, which has investments from 30 credit unions, has rolled out an AI-driven payments router that ships payments through the best channel based on a customer’s urgency and price sensitivity, he said, a service that credit unions are seeking. 

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