New CUSO Aims to Help with Asset Liability Management

By Roy Urrico

New York City-based Delfi Labs Inc., which provides an artificial intelligence (AI)-native balance sheet analytics and optimization platform, recently announced the launch of Delfi CUSO LLC, led by One Washington Financial (OWF), the wholly owned CUSO and holding company of Olympia, Wash.-based Washington State Employees Credit Union (WSECU; $5.1 billion, 330,000 members).

The goal of the new CUSO is to empower credit unions to leverage Delfi's asset liability management (ALM) platform to protect margins and manage interest-rate risks and more precisely unlock disciplined growth opportunities. The $1.8 billion Salem, Ore.-based Maps Credit Union (90,000 members) is joining as an early investor and adopter.

Delfi Co-Founder and CEO Daniel Ahn.

“We’re excited to be partnered with such innovative and forward-thinking credit unions,” said Co-Founder and CEO Daniel Ahn of Delfi. "Our AI technologies are meant to future-proof credit unions and help them punch above their weight for years to come.”

“Credit unions face the same balance‑sheet challenges as their largest competitors, but they manage them with smaller teams," said Scott Daukas, principal of OWF. “Delfi uses AI technology to bring large-bank capabilities to credit unions of all sizes. This CUSO is about faster, clearer insights that turn complex tradeoffs into confident, member‑first decisions."

OWF Principal Scott Daukas.

Mark Zook, CEO of Maps, said, “Joining this CUSO provides us early access to technology essential for us to make scenario‑driven decisions at the speed our environment demands,” said. "With Delfi, we have real‑time clarity across risk management, funding strategies, and loan opportunities. This improves our decision-making abilities to better safeguard the balance sheet and unlock growth."

Delfi Founder/CEO Daniel Ahn and OWF Principal Scott Daukas sat down with Finoptamus to discuss the data management challenges facing credit unions and how this CUSO can “democratize” access to ALM solutions.

Starting the CUSO

A former banker, head of research and chief economist, Ahn revealed he worked on Wall Street with big investment banks helping design portfolio optimization strategies and derivative hedging strategies. “It was an incredibly expensive process for the client,” he explained. “It was a very manual process priced at a price point that was beyond what middle America, Main Street and small and medium sized businesses could afford.”

This inspired Ahn to start Delfi in 2022, “with the challenge of helping enterprises of all sizes navigate financial volatility (and) financial risk. We were also talking with a lot of banks and credit unions about getting access to data. We realized there's a challenge that some of the smaller and medium-sized banks and credit unions face given the nature of the system, lack of resources, and scale of the giant bulge bracket banks.”

Delfi’s initial goal was to focus on the challenges of risk management and balance sheet optimization for U.S.-based financial institutions. Then, Ahn met Daukas at FinovateFall in New York City in 2024.

“I've been in the credit union industry for 26 years total. I was the chief risk officer, then a chief strategy officer,” said Daukas. “I found myself seeing all of these other AI companies that have a hammer looking for a nail, and this one (Delfi) is so perfectly positioned for the multiple problems credit unions face.”

Daukas described the speed the Delfi ALM system can access and analyze data as solving an ongoing issue for credit unions. “The big problem is that for credit unions, ALM is a regulatory requirement, and it is often viewed as such. If done properly, it should (provide) this great set of insights for your strategy, pricing and to really help drive your business performance. But it is so complicated, and the data is so hard to manage, that most people are just trying to get by with the regulatory perspective.”

Daukas continued: “When I saw Delfi's version of this, I immediately thought this closes that gap. This is what allows a credit union to see all of the possible scenarios stacked against each other so they can see truly where they are taking inappropriate risk or where there might be opportunities to leverage.”

That’s when Daukas reached out to Delfi. “The thing that struck me was this idea of trying to democratize Wall Street and bring it into Main Street. That really resonates with me and with credit unions. So, we thought how could we best take this into the credit union industry?” Those discussions led to the formation of the CUSO, announced officially on Feb. 3, 2026.

“Because we previously had a number of community bank users, but no credit unions, we believed the establishment of the CUSO, with the participation and subscription of leading credit unions like WSECU and Maps, was a real signal of credibility from the credit union landscape that we are onto something,” Ahn recalled.

Filling an ALM Gap At Credit Unions

“The differentiating factor that Delfi brings to the table is the ability to do a deep balance sheet analysis in minutes rather than days or weeks, but also really connecting analysis with action,” said Ahn. He explained further, “(We’re) not just doing this in a backward looking way for regulatory purposes only, but really trying to think forward and help try to shape strategy.”

Ahn added the Delfi CUSO hopes to demonstrate through various use cases that its platform “is really a game changer that is going to connect the dots between ALM analysis and balance sheet optimization in a way that hasn't really been able to be done before.”

Today, ALM compliance is quite a chore for credit unions, asserted Daukas. “The way that it works today for credit unions is that they (receive) two or three or four different types of reports from different places at different times. They have to make sense of all of those in a way to manage risk. That leaves a tremendous number of blind spots.”

Delfi CUSO aims to bring it all together in one platform to eliminates those blind spots. “We are so excited about bringing the industry the ability to not have to guess if I pull this lever, what will it do over here to my risk-reward equation. It's about bringing those disparate pieces of information that do not exist in a nice holistic platform, together,” Daukas told Finopotamus.

“We want to get it in the hands of credit unions, even if it is just ‘Hey, let us set up a pilot with you,’” added Daukas. “So, they can have that confidence it's absolutely going to do the regulatory thing, but once they feel comfortable with that, then they'll be able to see all of the strategic value.”

The CUSO is currently in the process of onboarding Maps and WSECU data, and training their respective CFOs. “The platform is meant as a kind of 10x force multiplier, to bring the kind of Wall Street caliber analysis and optimization that larger institutions are able to do,” said Ahn.

Daukas noted that if a credit union still needs help understanding and interpreting the reports, the CUSO has built a partnership with a CFO firm that is going to do fractional services on behalf of credit unions using the Delfi platform.

Internalizing ALM Analysis

While Daukas noted that many credit unions have all this information, they send it to a third-party vendor that returns a report back in a couple of weeks. “But then in order for them to make sense of that from a pricing standpoint, they have to go into a different tool to do pricing-related things. In the Delfi system, we can stack every one of those scenarios, both the regulatory required and our special scenarios against each other, and we can see the entire set of outcomes.”

 “With this tool, those reports will become part of everyone's internal team,” maintained Daukas. “They won't need to rely on sending that off to a third party and have them do it. We are just broadening the number of credit unions that are able to actually do this work with their own teams because the software is going to be at their fingertips, not sitting behind the black box of a third party.”

Ahn clarified the CUSO will specifically focus on the credit union space, while, “the Delfi Labs mothership, will continue to focus upon banks. But as heretical as it may sound, they face very similar challenges when it comes to asset liability management.”

The Delfi platform was named a top 25 semi-finalist for Filene’s FiLab's 2026 Test Menu, an innovation incubator program designed for the credit union industry.