- Key insights: New York City-based Municipal Credit Union is working on developing its own chatbot to provide members with information about the products and services it offers that it eventually hopes will integrate directly with its call center to provide more insights into its members.
- What's at stake: More than half of Americans use AI to help manage their financial decisions, according to TD Bank. Last year, only 10% of Americans used AI for financial planning.
- Forward look: The $4.6-billion-asset credit union plans to launch the first iteration of the chatbot in the next six to twelve months.
Consumers are increasingly turning to large language models outside of traditional financial services to shop for products and services related to their finances. But one credit union is refusing to cede ground.
New York City-based Municipal Credit Union is developing a chatbot that it expects to launch in the next six to 12 months and will initially provide its members with information about its products and services, Stuart Salembier, Municipal's senior vice president of member engagement and channel delivery, told American Banker.
"We are in the process of launching chat on our website, which will scrape our website, and allow our members to more easily research what we offer," Salembier told American Banker. "They won't have to click to multiple pages to be able to find things."
The $4.6-billion-asset Municipal is working with an external technology company, which also provides the credit union with a communications platform it uses for its call center, to develop the chatbot. That same platform will also be used to power the chat.
"[The chatbot] will interact and engage with our internal knowledge base, our website, and our team will have line of sight," he said.
The development comes amid a meteoric rise in consumers' comfortability in using chatbots for research and discovery, especially as it relates to financial services. More than half of Americans use AI to help manage their financial decisions, according to TD Bank's 2026 AI Insights Report, which surveyed 2,500 Americans. Last year, only 10% of Americans used AI for financial planning.
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Banks and credit unions face a discoverability challenge on AI platforms, according to Richard Crone, CEO of Crone Consulting.
"Community banks and credit unions are currently invisible on AI platforms because they do not publish their product detail pages for agentic discovery, even on Google Merchant Center," Crone told American Banker. "Banks, as retailers too, need the same [discovery] capability but are not getting it from their core processors, digital banking platforms, or CUSOs. They desperately need their core processors and digital banking platforms to build and deploy this 'write once, publish everywhere' infrastructure on their behalf."
Banks lacking discoverability on LLMs are likely to miss the entire digital-native cohorts, including Gen Z and Gen Alpha, who "start everything first on an LLM, and certainly not on a banking app," Crone said, noting that there are about 200 million ChatGPT users evaluating finances daily compared to 216 million total digital banking users.
While MCU does not provide its product information directly to LLMs like ChatGPT or Claude, it is hoping that its chatbot will give members more reason to engage with the credit union directly and ultimately provide greater insight in their financial lives.
"That's where a lot of AI is beneficial for financial institutions in that it gives us more insight into our members," Salembier said. "Hypothetically, if you're a member and you went to our website and started chatting with us — and at some point in time you identified yourself — we would then connect that chat to your profile, so that now if you call two days later to talk to someone about something, my team will see that you chatted with somebody else."
Consumer-facing chatbots are
To help ensure accuracy in its responses, the chatbot will launch with pre-built responses to approximately 1,500 common questions, rather than allowing it to generate answers, a MCU spokesperson told American Banker. If the chatbot cannot confidently answer a question, it will ask for clarification or route the inquiry to a member of MCU's team.
Eventually, Municipal plans to evolve the chatbot over time to help provide a more holistic view of members' financial lives, Salembier said.
"Eventually, we will turn it into the ability to have secure chat with our staff, or potentially secure chat with our bot, that might be able to give you information," Salembier said. "Rather than calling in, rather than going to a branch, you can just chat with us and find out, [for example,] 'What were the last five transactions on my checking account?' and we'll give you that information."
Members will be able to chat with a real person, too.
"Being able to give a member the ability to opt out of that bot conversation to speak with a live representative is the most important thing," Salembier said. "Our platform, when we launch it, will have the ability even go to a live chat where you're actually chatting with a human being."
