2026 Tekkie Award for Data-Driven Impact: Platinum Federal Credit Union

By John San Filippo

Finopotamus is pleased to announce the winners of the 2026 Tekkie Awards, all of whom will be profiled individually throughout the month of August. In this installment of the series, we highlight Platinum Federal Credit Union, which won the Data-Driven Impact Award. This award recognizes credit unions that have moved beyond data storage to data activation. Nominees must have demonstrated how they successfully utilized member or operational data in 2025 to drive specific, measurable results.

Moving Past the ‘Spray and Pray’ Approach

Serving a specialized, faith-based field of membership for the Shia Imami Ismaili Muslim community, Atlanta-based Platinum Federal Credit Union ($412 million in assets) is the youngest surviving credit union chartered in the state of Georgia. Despite its relatively young age of 26 years, PFCU serves members across 42 states, with a heavy concentration in the Southeast.

For years, the credit union’s approach to marketing mirrored that of many credit unions – broad, general outreach that treated the entire membership as a single cohort.

“In 2024, We weren’t looking for a solution. We were just marketing. Everything goes to everybody, email or any other,” said Kabir Laiwalla, CEO of Platinum Federal Credit Union. “Spray and pray. Hope it hits and just throw it out there. Even for business loans and business checking, it would go to individuals, kids, youth, everybody – basically the entire membership.”

That dynamic shifted in August 2024 at the League of Southeastern Credit Unions’ annual Idea Institute conference. While walking the vendor floor and attending a tech forum pitch session, Laiwalla and his board chairman encountered Vertice AI.

“Our chair noted that he gets all the marketing – he gets college savings promos, business promos, and a lot of stuff that simply doesn’t apply to him as an individual member,” Laiwalla recalled. “[Vertice AI] presented an immediate opportunity to personalize marketing to our membership.”

Notably, Vertice AI is itself a 2026 Tekkie Award recipient, having earned the Industry Game Changer Award. The Game Changer category recognizes technology providers whose platforms fundamentally alter how credit unions operate and serve their members. Vertice AI’s platform proved to be the exact engine PFCU needed to turn its underlying core data into active, targeted campaigns.

Data Activation Meets Core Integration

A common bottleneck for credit unions adopting advanced analytics or artificial intelligence solutions is data cleanliness and system integration. Fortunately for PFCU, the institution had completed a core conversion in October 2023, migrating from Sharetec to the hosted model of Jack Henry’s Symitar platform.

“We had done a lot of cleanup almost a year before when we started the conversion cycle. We cleaned up closed, inactive, and dormant accounts, making sure email addresses were captured. So that became an ongoing theme at the credit union,” explained Laiwalla.

To facilitate seamless data flow between Symitar and Vertice AI, Vertice secured Vendor Integration Program (VIP) certification with Jack Henry. This made it easier to build standardized integrations to extract member demographic and behavioral data directly into the Vertice AI platform.

“All we had to do was run those scripts to make sure it was all good, and within a week or two, we were up and running,” Laiwalla said. “For member privacy, they hash the member numbers so it is completely secure. When they send the output back, we run it through an algorithm that converts it back to the member number on our side so our staff can identify who to engage.”

PFCU established an automated data refresh schedule every seven days (on the 7th, 14th, 21st, and month-end) to keep campaign target lists updated with current account behavior.

From Predictive Analytics to Actioned Insights

Rather than requiring extensive data science expertise, Vertice AI’s platform gives lean internal teams direct control over hyper-targeted campaigns. For Zoya Amirali, PFCU’s one-person marketing department, the platform served as an immediate operational force multiplier.

“Using Vertice in the beginning was pretty straightforward,” noted Amirali. “For any campaign, you simply select which product you want to grow. We get to see all of our membership that doesn’t have that product and filter it further by high propensity, demographic, or age.”

PFCU launched its first major Vertice-driven initiative around certificates of deposit (CDs). Facing competitive pressure for liquidity across the financial sector, PFCU used the platform to identify members with a high likelihood of opening a certificate.

“At the time, our CD rates were something we wanted to push, and we wanted to build our liquidity up to 12% or 13%,” Laiwalla noted. “Historically, we learned it’s not worth making existing members jump through hoops by requiring ‘new money only’ or forcing them to move funds elsewhere just to bring them back. We made the promotion available to everyone and used Vertice AI to target members with the highest propensity.”

The results of switching to personalized, data-driven outreach were immediate and sustained.

“From a marketing perspective, Vertice has been very helpful, having everything all in one place,” said Amirali. “It almost serves as an additional member of the marketing team – like a data-driven team member.”

Scaling Growth and Member Satisfaction

Vertice AI CEO Mitch Rutledge emphasized that PFCU’s journey represents a major hurdle facing credit unions nationwide: moving past passive reporting toward execution.

“There is no lack of data in credit unions. We are not data poor; we are insight and action poor,” said Rutledge. “Credit unions don’t need more dashboards. What they need are actioned insights. Our goal is to help small and mid-sized credit unions compete with money-center banks by making a lean team exponentially more effective at knowing and engaging members at scale.”

By leveraging AI-driven predictive modeling and targeted messaging, Vertice AI enables institutions to segment communications down to distinct member cohorts.

“The way you talk to an 18-year-old who joined two months ago about checking accounts should be fundamentally different than the way you talk to an 80-year-old who has been a member for 40 years,” Rutledge said. “Most institutions send the same message to both. Vertice allows credit unions to compose personalized, compliant content for specific audiences quickly.”

For PFCU, activating its member data through Vertice AI delivered measurable gains in both wallet penetration and overall member expansion. While industry membership growth has hovered near flat or low single digits, PFCU experienced an 8% to 9% increase in membership growth over the past year.

Beyond top-line growth metrics, member feedback highlighted the qualitative value of receiving relevant financial communications.

“I have gotten compliments from members directly in the last six to eight months telling me that the marketing they receive now relates to them directly and feels like a personal conversation,” said Laiwalla. “Our wallet penetration has gone up, word of mouth has spread, and member satisfaction has spiked. It all stems from using direct, relatable marketing grounded in member data.”

Looking Ahead to Omnichannel Activation

Building on its initial success, PFCU is expanding its data activation roadmap. The credit union recently collaborated with Vertice AI to ingest external leads from third-party partners like SavvyMoney into the platform. Vertice built a custom ingestion workflow in a matter of days, allowing PFCU to track campaign conversions and long-term product impact from external lead streams every seven days alongside core data.

PFCU is also exploring deeper integrations with its digital banking provider, Jack Henry’s Banno, to automatically deliver personalized digital banner graphics directly inside the mobile and online banking environment based on Vertice AI audience segments.

By transforming raw core records into an active, continuous engagement engine, Platinum Federal Credit Union has set a clear benchmark for how mid-sized credit unions can leverage data to drive real-world business outcomes – earning them the 2026 Tekkie Award for Data-Driven Impact.