- Key insights: Mountain Home, Idaho-based Pioneer Federal Credit Union plans to offer earned wage access through a partnership with fintech Veep.
- What's at stake: Short-term liquidity products are gaining popularity with consumers, especially those who don't have access to traditional credit, and credit unions are looking for new ways to keep their members in the fold and engaged.
- Forward look: Pioneer is planning to quietly launch the service in early June on its digital banking app, with a wider rollout to come later.
Short-term liquidity products are becoming more popular with consumers, creating an impetus for at least one credit union to offer an alternative to payday lending.
Mountain Home, Idaho-based Pioneer Federal Credit Union is adding earned wage access to its menu through a partnership with Veep, an embedded EWA fintech founded in 2023 and owned by private equity firm Black Dragon Capital.
For Pioneer, EWA is a way for the $734-million-asset credit union to deepen engagement and drive loyalty with its members while at the same time offer an alternative to other high-cost, short-duration loans, said Tracey Miller, executive vice president and vice president of operations at Pioneer.
"We have a lot of payday lenders around us and we see a lot of our members getting stuck with payday loans," Miller told American Banker. "By the time we can actually help them, they're so far down it's really difficult, and then we're having to work with other companies to see if they can negotiate interest rates to get them out of a financial burden. So we try to offer products that stop them from going down that route."
While many earned wage access providers integrate with payroll providers or offer their services directly to the consumer, Veep's platform embeds into Pioneer's core and uses artificial intelligence to build a financial wellness score that helps Pioneer underwrite each request for short-term liquidity. Veep also has payroll integrations.
"We don't need the time and attendance, we need the core data," Sharon Kirby-Wright, Veep's global partnerships director, told American Banker. "The payroll data we pull is an umbrella that sits across the top of all of that to give us even deeper knowledge on how that member is behaving in their working life."
Pioneer is the first credit union to use Veep's embedded AnytimePay platform, according to Kirby-Wright, who noted that it is working with one other unnamed credit union to use its platform in addition to Pioneer.
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MyPay, Chime's earned wage access product, logged more than $400 million in annualized revenue in the first quarter, according to Chime. Block's short-term liquidity product, Cash App Borrow, has also seen increased uptake from its userbase, and in the third quarter of 2025 logged a 134% year-over-year
The wellness score is an opportunity for Pioneer to move outside of its traditional credit box and view its members in a different light while also building member loyalty in the process.
"One of the big things that we're finding is that credit scores work great when you're doing consumer lending for vehicles and more in-the-box lending that we've been doing for years," Miller said. "Our members are looking for more than just that on the lending side. They're not looking for large personal loans anymore. They're not looking at lines of credits. They're looking at the things that are there when they need it, and they're looking for us to protect them along the way."
Pioneer is targeting a quiet release in early June on its digital banking app. "We'll put it out, let people find it, and then see what our members' feedback is," Miller said.
From there, the credit union will do a phased rollout, targeting some of its members that it thinks would benefit most from the product before it rolls it out to its wider member base through mass marketing campaigns.
Pricing decisions are still being ironed out, but Miller said the credit union is considering charging about $3 to access the service. The amount of capital that is lent will depend on the individual member's financial standing and wellness score.
"We don't want to price our members out right when our members are hitting those life curves," Miller said. "There's places in your life when [credit unions] can gain those loyalties, and it's not normally in the good times."
The earned wage access industry has few barriers to entry and is becoming more diverse in its revenue, customer acquisition and integration models, according to David Scharf, a managing director and equities analyst at Citizens Bank, who noted that despite the increase in new entrants into the market, pricing pressure has not yet materialized.
"The EWA value proposition is based around filling short-term cash flow gaps for the average consumer. While many consumers may overdraft their bank accounts when in need of cash, these EWA platforms provide short-term loans at a fraction of the dollar cost," Scharf said in a research note. "There remains a long runway of growth in the form of capturing share from the bank overdraft market."
