White Clay Brings Profitability-Based Incentives to Credit Unions
By Roy Urrico
Louisville, Ky.-based relationship profitability and analytics software provider White Clay announced an expansion of its incentive management capabilities to credit unions and community banks, bringing profitability-based incentives to the community financial institution space.
“It’s a broken system to reward bankers for driving metrics that don’t improve profitability,” said Scott Earwood, Chief Revenue Officer at White Clay. “Regional banks have cracked this code and proven the value of aligning incentives with profitability, and we at White Clay have been powering this approach for decades. Now, AI allows us to automate these decisions at scale and bring the same capabilities to community financial institutions. Our work with institutions like Financial Plus Credit Union (FPCU) has shown that community institutions can make the shift to smarter, profitability-based incentives with ease. It’s a gamechanger for the industry.”
Earwood and Ryan Carley, SVP of Retail Delivery at the $1.7 billion Flint, Mich.-based FPCU, which serves more than 85,000 members, revealed to Finopotamus how White Clay enables community FIs to automate performance incentives.
How White Clay Works
“White Clay provides data and pricing and profitability relationship intelligence solutions to banks and credit unions around the country. We've got banking institutions from $300 to 400 million all the way up to $300 billion in size,” explained Earwood.
Traditionally, most community FIs favor incentivizing bankers based on production, like the volume or value of loans originated, according to White Clay. While these metrics can be simple to calculate, they do not necessarily lead to improved profitability.
“What I was talking about when I was saying it's broken is for years, there were some data and technical challenges and things,” Earwood explained. “Institutions just paid people to go get a next customer, a next member, or a next product. It wasn't always related to the institution's strategy…driving a better performance so they could open more branches, help more members, those things.”
White Clay now enables credit unions and community banks to automate performance incentives based on the FI's unique profitability metrics, like relationship profitability, net interest and fee income, deposit growth and customer retention. This significantly cuts manual data entry and boosts growth.
White Clay consults with each institution to customize an incentive plan around their strategy and goals, incorporating the right profitability-based metrics or a hybrid approach, with the flexibility to evolve as the institution grows, Earwood noted. Goals are then established down to the individual level, giving bankers visibility into their progress, and management insights for coaching and reviews. The automated process also significantly reduces manual data entry.
“What we do is we gather all the data around every account and transaction that a financial institution has, and then add some intelligence to it to display what your customers or what your members are worth,” said Earwood.
“What has happened for many years any deal you could get on the books counted towards your incentive. And sometimes those weren't great deals,” Earwood added. “We want to make sure that the things that institutions are rewarding their reps, bankers and managers for doing are things that actually improve the institution, not maybe just a widget that's checking a box.”
FPCU Incentivizes its Staff
Since implementing White Clay’s tool, FPCU has cut incentive management from 80 hours a week to less than five. Through July 2026, its retail business reported loan growth of 111%, member growth of 102% and deposit growth of 100%, while its Net Promoter Score (NPS) increased more than three points in the last four months.
“White Clay has transformed how we manage incentives, making the process more efficient, accurate and transparent,” said Carley. “The tool is tailored to our credit union’s specific needs, and everyone from individual bankers to branch, district and overall retail leadership can see how they perform against their goals weekly. It’s become the glue between our sales process and incentive plan, helping us drive the right banker behaviors. There’s no other product like it on the market.”
The tool, Earwood said, is available through an interactive dashboard alongside White Clay’s relationship profitability, pricing and analytics capabilities, creating one seamless environment with consistent data.
“I think in many financial institutions, and specifically at our credit union, the incentive plan was tracked on a multitude of Excel spreadsheets as well as some subjective measurements that were hard to actually track down,” said Carley. He described how “having the opportunity to work with not only the data side of the equation, but the incentive side of the equation had shown us that there is a better way to do that. Going to a system that provides transparency, allows people to see where the data is coming from and delivers it in a way in which branch A can see what branch B is doing, (and) what the commercial team is doing, creates a level of consistency that ultimately has people on the same page.”
Implementing the System
FPCU’s first meeting with White Clay took place in 2020, when they started looking “for a provider that will allow us to look at our entire portfolio from a membership perspective,” said Carley. “And then ultimately, how do we link that to the main incentive drivers, which are member growth, deposit growth, loan growth, and then some non-interest income measurements, which for us is often, transactions, fee income buckets, et cetera.”
White Clay’s installation process at FPCU began in 2021. “It's a 90-day timeframe. But the first implementation part is just gathering all the data,” explained Earwood. “Once you gather all the data, make sure it all fits and it's calibrated to the institution. It was maybe a year, year and a half before we rolled out (the) incentive (part) next.”
Earwood explained White Clay process uses various types of AI behind the scenes, but in the case for FPCU’s incentive, it's really was figuring out what the CU wanted to track that's leading towards their strategic goals, and then working on a way to show them how they were performing right now, quarterly and yearly. “What we do is when we get in all the new data for the week, we go through and update and make sure that everybody's incentive plan is up to date with their most current performance.”
Earwood further illuminated White Clay’s process. “We update it all every week on Friday, we see a giant spike because everybody's wanting to check their numbers. We have a green, yellow, red system they look to observe if they hitting their goals?”
For FPCU, White Clay automated everything they were doing manually. Then the next part, put it in a usable dashboard that connects to the main dashboards that show relationships. “It's not only an incentive platform, but it's also in an integral part of how they're measuring, inspecting and coaching their performance so that they're taking care of their members,” said Earwood.
“One of the big components, the ability to see not only the branches or the individual MSRs portfolio, they're then able to see how their production ties to their goals.,” explained Carley. “That is the power of making sure that everybody is updated at the same time, but everybody is being measured on the same metrics, which truly makes the biggest difference.”
Credit Union Pitch
“We talk a little bit less about profitability with credit unions than we do with banks, but it's still an important part, so we talk to them about getting their entire institution looking at one version of the truth,” said Earwood.
Earwood also pointed out because sometimes disparate systems at credit unions can produce different reports. “[White Clay] is a consolidation where it's all calibrated to the institution so that everybody's on the same page. In a lot of ways, I'm selling fundamentals, the blocking and tackling that has to be done.”
“What I've noticed is our top performing branches performing better because they see who is in their peer group and they want to compete against the next branch,” admitted Carley.
Carley also mentioned the impact of the White Clay incentive program when FPCU launched the first of five new branches over the next 12 months. “Frankly it allowed us in our first month and a half open to bring in 150 brand new members because they have the transparency across the board and they can see immediately when White Clay updates who they've onboarded and then they can follow up on those members.”
On the future expansion, FPCU plans to use White Clay to expand into the small business side of the business in the branches. That includes how that member utilizes the credit union, whether it's through mobile, online or the contact center. “Over time, we'll be able to tailor our delivery of the experience to that member based on how they're utilizing us,” said Carley.
“Financial Plus is actually was our first foray into the credit union space. We've had a long history of banks and we've learned a whole lot from FPCU,” said Earwood, adding that White Clay is considering launching some future apps based on FPCU’s operating model. “We're working on building out some software with (FPCU) that we want to roll out to more of the credit union space. It’s a combination of boots on the ground and information all working in the same direction, a really powerful combination.”
