Cultivating Trust: Anthony Volpe on Why Credit Unions Need a Foundational AI Alternative

By John San Filippo

As the ACU Governmental Affairs Conference kicked off in Washington, D.C. on Mar. 1, the tech buzz was around artificial intelligence (AI). But as Anthony Volpe, the newly minted CEO of the CUSO CUltivate, told Finopotamus, AI success isn’t just about adopting new tech; it’s about adopting the “right tech.”

Anthony Volpe

CUltivate, a technology spin-out from Vertice AI in partnership with the Filene Institute and Vizo Financial, aims to provide credit unions with a foundational AI platform that prioritizes the industry’s bedrock values: trust, transparency, and member privacy.

Moving Beyond General Purpose AI

Many credit union leaders have been understandably cautious about allowing employees to use general-purpose AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude. Volpe acknowledges this hesitation as a hallmark of the industry’s responsible nature.

“What we’ve seen as part of Vertice AI and serving this industry for the last three years has been a reluctance from CEOs, from boards, from others, to give their employees full access to tools like ChatGPT,” Volpe said. “And that in no way is a criticism. In fact, I think that’s the ethos of this industry, right? Being properly cautious, being properly concerned about trust, transparency and member privacy.”

Cultivate, he explained, was designed to solve this dilemma by offering a powerful AI assistant that operates within a secure, self-contained environment.

An AI with a Specific Mission

Unlike general-purpose models that can answer everything from trivia to complex coding, CUltivate is narrowly focused on the credit union movement.

“It’s a much more narrowly focused AI model that recognizes its whole purpose is to serve credit union employees,” Volpe explained. Finopotamus asked what would happen if an employee asked, for example, when Linda Ronstadt achieved her first #1 record. “The knowledge around Linda Ronstadt might be important in some marketing collateral that needs to be built, but hopefully it would choose to say, ‘Great question, but we’re here to work on credit union specific credit union business.’”

This focus ensures that the tool remains a professional asset rather than a general-purpose toy, further reinforcing the security of the data it handles. “None of the data is going outside of our environment,” Volpe emphasized. “It’s totally self-contained within CUltivate.”

The “Eager Intern” in the Back Office

While some industry leaders fear that AI will lead to widespread layoffs, Volpe views the technology as a way to enhance, not replace, the human element in credit unions. He envisions the tool as a highly capable assistant that handles the “heavy lifting” of data analysis and content generation, freeing up staff for high-value member interactions.

“The best combination is people made smarter, made more efficient with it,” Volpe noted. “What is it like to have an eager assistant next to you, who knows so much, has access to so much information and data, but doesn’t tell you how to do everything? But they’re there making suggestions, they’re there to take orders. That eager intern is kind of the vision that we have.”

The Evolution of Credit Risk

To those still skeptical of AI, Volpe pointed out that the movement has been using a form of AI for decades, through credit risk systems.

“The best example of AI in the credit union space started decades ago, and that is the credit risk system,” Volpe said. “Any definition of AI encapsulates what has been done for decades with credit risk. You apply for something, I take your Social Security number and I send it to a cloud provider, which has built models and updated them and updated them over time and done crazy things with them, and it comes back with a score.”

By framing modern AI as a natural evolution of these established systems, Volpe hopes to lower the barrier for adoption across the industry.

Looking Toward GAC 2031

When Finopotamus asked for a prediction, Volpe said he sees a future where AI is so deeply integrated into the workflow that it no longer requires its own buzzword. “I think when we are at GAC five years from now, everybody here will be using AI extensively within their organization,” he predicted. “Five years from now, people won’t be talking about AI. They’ll just be working.”