CD Valet Uses FinovateFall to Drive the Need to Attract Deposits

By Roy Urrico

CD Valet’s Head of Product Howie Wu sat down with Finopotamus at FinovateFall 2025, held September 8-10, 2025 at the Marriott Marquis Times Square in New York City, to discuss how CD Valet’s digital marketplace can help credit unions and banks attract deposits and build account holder relationships.

CD Valet’s Head of Product Howie Wu at FinovateFall 2025.

Seattle-based CD Valet connects consumers with the best CD rates and terms nationwide, helping community financial institutions (FIs) attract new deposits. With CD Valet, Wu said banks and credit unions are “empowered” to digitally compete with the largest financial institutions, while consumers gain greater visibility and access to better rates. CD Valet offers over 35,000 CD rates, interest calculators and comparison tools for consumers. Financial institutions can use a full suite of advertising, analytics, and account opening tools to support deposit acquisition.

“For these institutions that need to raise deposits, access liquidity, obviously deposits are a big game now because the rate environment has changed drastically. Everybody is fighting for deposits,” Wu told Finopotamus. “Consumers are very intelligent. They are going to move their money to where they are going to get the most bang for the buck. Especially for credit unions, it is a tremendous opportunity for them to leverage our marketplace to list their product.”

Trying to Raise Deposits

CD Valet began in 2021 as a means for Seattle Bank CD “to raise deposits in a really quick fashion,” explained Wu. “We were basically trying to fund a large lending portfolio that we were going to purchase. We started looking at how do you get broader awareness across the nation. It really just did not pencil from an economic standpoint, from an origination standpoint, on a cost per origination for smaller institutions. We ended up saying, ‘Well how do other smaller institutions, community banks, credit unions, really do this?’ That is why we created a marketplace that could actually list all CDs that are available across the entire financial services industry.”

Wu noted that not every FI publicly lists available rates. “We have over 35,000 rates that we are managing across our platform, and we update on a daily basis. Whether you are a customer of ours from a financial service standpoint or not, your rate is going to be listed as long as it is publicly available off of your website.”

As CD Valet grew the product, Wu explained, “It became okay to generate revenue, now (for) our financial services partners we can become a marketing extension for them. We become their marketplace. We have become a place where we can get them exposure to products available nationwide on the consumer side.”

Best Offer and a Hand Off

Wu said CD Valet supports around 55 FI customers. Roughly half of its clients are credit unions, including the $13.9 billion Bethpage, N.Y.-based FourLeaf Federal Credit Union (Formerly Bethpage FCU) with its more than 502,000 members.

Most of CD Valet’s customers have an “open now” button that redirects consumers to the credit union’s or bank’s digital account opening solution or a lead landing page to begin the origination process, said Wu. “So, you can think of it as almost a ‘buy now experience’ for those CDs. It is then left up to the consumer to figure out how they originate that CD.”

CD Valet maintains neutral territory with its rate chart. “We try to be as unbiased as possible. The whole concept is we list our rate table highest to lowest. Obviously for many of these institutions, there's obviously qualification criteria. We try to make the shopping experience very clear to consumers. We do not obviously want them to think that a CD's available to them if they do not necessarily qualify. We use geolocation, because a lot of institutions like credit unions need (the consumer) to be in their local community. We do build some technology to really streamline that experience to present the product’s best offers.”

While CD Valet can originate CDs, most of the time they hand off leads. “We do have a white label of a basic origination platform and a service that we can offer to FIs. But generally, I would say 99% of the time right now, we do not originate it. That's what is unique about us,” said Wu. “The whole idea is we are not offering brokered CDs. We just basically hand that consumer off to the FI partner of ours, and they originate it generally through their own digital origination.”

Wu continued, “(The credit union or bank) can contact them or if they have a digital solution, (the consumer) can fulfill it completely online. Or they will reach out to the consumer and actually originate over the phone or obviously a branch. Our goal is to try to connect the consumer to the best product offering for them.”

No Charge to List

“What is important to remember is we do not charge to list,” said Wu. “Where we do charge is if a credit union does partner with us and creates a working relationship, then we add that ‘open now,” the call to action that'll take them direct to the institution or generates a lead.” CD Valet, he added, also receives a per unit revenue cut for every CD transaction closed.

From a technology standpoint, Wu said it is simple. “Depending on where you want to send (the lead), we can link it directly to the origination platform.” If the credit union (or bank) wants a lead, CD Valet can build a lead form. We'll work with the credit union and actually build that lead generation form. The user can then use that lead form. CD Valet can then generate a report that the FI can extract on a regular basis. Or we can even automate that process and have it, for example, emailed to somebody and notified anytime there is a new lead.”

CD Valet has worked with a few affiliate partners to drive volume, according to Wu, such as San Francisco-based Prelim, which provides a white-labeled, omnichannel platform for financial institutions to digitize and automate the customer onboarding process for various services.

Wu added that CD Valet also offers an intelligence tool in the backend that can provide a full reporting data set to the ALCO (asset-liability committee), management and/or leadership teams to price their CD product appropriately. “They can get the deposits that they want and not necessarily have to give it away. They price competitively. The benefit is obviously they optimize their margin and return.”

Wu noted, “In the last two months, you obviously are starting to see the rates come down. So, if you look at that reporting tool that we have there are plenty of FIs that still have high rates. Because every institution has very different goals. You are going to raise your rate if you need to raise deposits quickly. There are still amazing pockets of institutions, whether that's banks or credit unions, where the rates are still incredibly high.”

Earlier in September, CD Valet revealed that approximately 74% of CD rate changes made from Aug. 1 to Aug. 31, 2025, were decreases. Of the institutions that increased CD rates, approximately 66% were credit unions.