Everwise Credit Union, previously known as
"We started our CRM journey back in June of 2023, deciding that we wanted to have an enterprise wide CRM solution," Hannah Rhodes, vice president of platform transformation for Everwise, told American Banker.
The credit union had several use cases in mind for the new CRM platform, including marketing, sales and servicing.
"We are going full-blown," Rhodes said. "We are dealing with 27 different departments throughout our organization, and this will be used by almost everybody in the organization."
Jennifer Castaneda, Everwise's CRM product manager, told American Banker that the credit union's goal is to unify its back-end systems with a single CRM platform.
"We have a full service banking team, and we can help with everything from business checking and business credit cards all the way up to small businesses and commercial lending," she said. "We hope to be able to use our CRM to bring all of our business areas together."
After over a year of market and vendor research, Everwise settled on the software vendor Creatio for its CRM needs in September 2024. The credit union has been incrementally integrating Creatio's CRM platform into its tech stack over the last year with what Rhodes called a "scrum and agile" methodology.
"Once we had selected Creatio we had what we call an inception phase, which is where we further validated our business requirements," Rhodes continued. "That started in earnest in the last quarter of 2024. Then our implementation started in earnest in the first quarter of this year."
The credit union is still in the process of implementing Creatio's technology across the different departments of the company, and a date of completion for the integration has yet to be announced.
Creatio is an AI-powered no-code tech provider that offers CRM software to multiple industries, including banks and credit unions.
"We provide out-of-the-box financial services workflows, and then you can make them your own through no-code tools and configure them to make it fit your needs and wants as a credit union," Chris Jackson, financial services strategy lead for Creatio, told American Banker.
The tech provider uses a combination of predictive, generative and agentic AI, which allows customers like Everwise to manipulate its tools without advanced coding knowledge.
"It enables business users to actually get their hands dirty in the system and start building their own processes," Jackson said.
Castaneda said the fact that Creatio's software is no-code/low-code was a factor in how Everwise decided to become a customer.
"It's an area of pride within Creatio that they're able to provide a system that we're finding to be extremely configurable," she said. "We're able to build a system that meets our needs both now and in the future, and we've truly enjoyed the usability of the platform throughout this particular process."
Creatio's software can process prompts written in conversational language (the way humans talk to each other) and "translate" it on the back end into coding languages that a computer can process.
"You can also switch between conversational and traditional [coding] language," Jackson said. "A lot of times business users are more comfortable talking in conversational language, but sometimes developers have a little bit more experience using these types of tools, so they may want that traditional experience."
According to a report from Allied Market Research, the global banking CRM software industry is estimated to reach
Everwise has high hopes for the potential of Creatio's AI-powered CRM platform for the 300,000-member credit union.
"The relationship that we have [with Creatio] has allowed us to be able to dream big when it comes to the CRM," Castaneda said. "We can make the experience better, maximizing the conversations and the relationships that our staff have with our members when they're not busy in front of a computer system trying to learn what the procedures are or trying to navigate their way around older, more antiquated systems."
