Starting with the Goal: How Vertice AI’s New OPTIMIZE Module Reverses the Credit Union Marketing Model
By John San Filippo
In conventional credit union marketing, campaign calendars are often constructed tactically: a spring auto loan push, a summer home equity promotion, and a certificate drive in the fall. While these initiatives keep messaging in front of the membership, they frequently operate in isolation from high-level balance sheet priorities and boardroom targets. That’s according to Mitch Rutledge, Co-Founder and CEO of Vertice AI. (Vertice AI won the Game Changer Award in the 2026 Finopotamus Tekkie Awards.)
Vertice AI, Rutledge contends, is intent on flipping that dynamic entirely. The Athens, Ga.-based provider of predictive analytics and member-growth solutions has officially announced Vertice OPTIMIZE, an engine designed to take an institution’s top-line business goals and work backward into a comprehensive, automated execution strategy.
Vertice AI debuted the engine live on stage at FinovateFall in New York last week. OPTIMIZE is currently running in select early adopter institutions before moving into broad general availability across the credit union sector in the fourth quarter.
Finopotamus met with Rutledge to discuss how the solution functions, how it manages conflicting departmental priorities, and what it means for resource-constrained marketing teams.
Reversing the Planning Equation
Vertice AI built its core platform around scoring members and prospects on propensity to adopt specific financial products and services. According to Rutledge, OPTIMIZE represents the natural evolution of that data modeling.
“Start with what your institutional goals are. What are you trying to do? Are you trying to grow members, grow products per member, grow loans – down to I want this many checking accounts. Set the goals and then let the marketing get optimized to align to the goals,” said Rutledge. “That’s what OPTIMIZE is about. Start with what your institutional goals are and then let’s build the programs to achieve those goals.”
Rather than manually matching member segments to static offers, the platform pairs institutional goals with predictive churn and acquisition scoring. Rutledge emphasized that the engine views institutional data holistically rather than executing isolated, rules-based logic.
“What we’re doing is saying no [to rules-based logic]. John shows high propensity for an auto loan. Gabriela shows high propensity for a HELOC. When they log into mobile banking, make sure we show their highest propensity product,” Rutledge explained. “We’re thinking more holistically. There’s lots of solutions that say, ‘Hey, you want more checking accounts? Let’s focus on checking accounts. You know, you want auto loans? We can do auto loans.’ What’s unique about Vertice is this holistic view of the goals of the institution aligned to what the data shows about the ability to achieve that, and then literally using advanced operations research optimization to determine the right levers and programs that we can do on a holistic basis.”
Solving Operational Headaches for Big and Small Institutions
For marketing leaders, constructing a quarterly or annual campaign calendar often consumes weeks of cross-departmental meetings. Rutledge claimed that OPTIMIZE compresses that planning cycle down to minutes, generating prioritized action plans and personalized, NCUA-compliant creative across channels like email, direct mail, and digital display.
For larger credit unions, Rutledge noted that the engine serves another vital function: acting as an objective arbiter between competing departmental targets. “We’re giving a place that we can take potentially competing goals of the organization and we can have an arbiter against those goals.”
Rutledge also illustrated how departmental friction plays out in practice. “If the chief lending officer has a goal to grow loans by X percent, and then on the other side we’ve got somebody saying no, we need to reduce churn by you know Y percent, those could be in conflict. Now I have an arbiter that can say, ‘Here are two goals. We may or may not be able to achieve them both.’
At smaller institutions, where marketing departments frequently consist of a single individual wearing multiple hats, the platform acts as an operational multiplier. “For the $200 million credit union that has one person in marketing, we’ve just optimized their whole year and given them all of the things that they can do literally in a matter of minutes,” proclaimed Rutledge.
Dynamic Retooling and Rollout Plans
A common pitfall with annual marketing plans is that real-world economic conditions shift quickly, rendering static calendars obsolete within months, he noted. If an Asset-Liability Committee (ALCO) suddenly calls for deposit surges or interest rate fluctuations disrupt loan appetite, for example, OPTIMIZE is designed to adjust dynamically.
“We’re going to show you every week how your credit union is performing against those goals. Based on any number of external factors, you may need to reoptimize, or even change a goal,” said Rutledge.
He further explained that existing Vertice AI clients do not need to undertake new engineering projects or custom integrations to deploy the feature, as it operates as an add-on module within the current platform architecture.
