Think of it as Shark Tank with a credit union spin, and it’s just been renewed for another season.
The 2025 Innovation Series from CreditUnions.com and Callahan & Associates is underway. Every year since 2018, this series has offered a select group of suppliers 10 minutes each to impress an audience of credit union decision-makers. It’s simple: Each vendor pitches its offerings and attendees vote on their favorites.
The Innovation Series was a hit from the get-go and continues to grow in popularity. This year’s focus areas include financial wellness, member experience, lending, digital, analytics, and member engagement.
Read on for more from this year’s lending finalists Exagens — MoneySparxs, Prizeout, Pulsate, and Spiral. Plus, make sure to join us for the Innovations In Member Engagement webinar. Register today!
Exagens – MoneySparxs
Describe your innovation.
Behavioral Banking enables emotionally significant relationships to be created and nurtured, cost-effectively, individually, and at scale, with the growing pool of members who now rarely interact with your credit union in-person. It makes possible the benefits of customer engagement, loyalty, and financial wellness in an era when most interactions and transactions occur through digital channels. MoneySparxs, exagens’ latest Behavioral Banking solution, fuses behavioral economics, neuroscience, advanced data analytics, psychology, and AI to understand the financial decisions of individuals, and then effectively engage and influence them to make smarter financial decisions. It adds incredible new value to your existing data and enriches it further. Behavioral Banking is needed because people are constantly being swayed by cognitive biases, emotions and social factors, and therefore rarely make rational decisions when it comes to their finances. Behavioral Banking solutions enable credit unions to grow with their members by catalyzing them to save, spend, invest, and borrow wiser both through their digital channels as well as in-branch.
What opportunity or challenge does it address?
- The Challenge: The ease and convenience of digital banking has yielded an explosion in the frequency of banking interactions and significant cost savings for financial institutions. It has also fractured financial relationships and their benefits. People who primarily bank through digital channels report being significantly less engaged with their Financial Institution, resulting in lower share of wallet, reduced loyalty, decreased customer satisfaction, and an adverse impact on financial health.
- The Opportunity: This disconnect provides credit unions with a unique opportunity to differentiate and grow by leveraging their historical strengths to differentiate their member experience and compete with big banks who otherwise far outspend them on technology. Exagens MoneySparxs enables credit unions to elevate their digital and in-branch experiences and move beyond providers of mostly commodity products and services to trusted and valued financial partners in the lives of their members.
- The results: Credit unions utilizing Behavioral Banking have benefited from increased deposits, expanded wallet share, higher card utilization, membership growth, and great loyalty, all while helping improve the financial lives of their members.
How does it increase member value?
MoneySparxs enables credit unions to grow financially with their members by delivering Behavioral Baking at scale through their digital channels. It delivers emotionally and financially engaging Sparks* (personal and community money-related tips, wisdom, suggestions, and fun insights) which catalyzes individuals to save, spend, invest, and borrow wisely.
What differentiates this innovation from competitors?
Based in behavioral science and leveraging AI, MoneySparxs goes well beyond traditional methods of segmenting, personas, and journey mapping by treating and interacting with each individual member in terms of their unique financial situation. With a deep understanding of human behavior and financial decision making (why decisions are and are not made), MoneySparxs is able to catalyze members in ways beneficial to them and their credit unions. Exagens designed MoneySparxs from the ground up with the sensibilities and realities of credit unions in mind. It is cost-effective, requires no PII, produces results quickly, and does not require any additional credit union resources to operate – exagens does most of the work, credit unions and their members get all of the benefit.
Prizeout
Describe your innovation.
CashBack+ is the first platform to centralize all cashback rewards into a single balance within credit unions’ online and mobile banking platforms. Unlike traditional rewards programs that redirect members offsite or rely on confusing points systems, CashBack+ provides a seamless, co-branded experience that keeps credit unions top of wallet. There are three different ways to earn cashback, each designed to maximize member engagement, loyalty, and non-interest income. Built by credit unions for credit unions, CashBack+ enables institutions of all sizes to compete effectively against larger banks.
What opportunity or challenge does it address?
Credit unions face increasing competition from large financial institutions, as they don’t have the same access to digital tools and talent. Traditional rewards programs often fail due to complexity, poor user experience, and limited accessibility to debit cardholders.
CashBack+ solves these issues by offering an embedded rewards platform directly available to members from their account page within online banking, making rewards easy to explore, access and use. This innovative program helps credit unions retain members, grow engagement, and boost revenue without requiring significant infrastructure changes.
How does it increase member value?
For members, CashBack+ simplifies earning and redeeming rewards. Instead of tracking points or navigating multiple platforms, all cashback earned flows into a single, growing balance within their accounts. Members can earn cashback when they shop with their credit union account, complete incentived actions and pay at checkout with their credit union account. At Michigan State University Federal Credit Union ($8.2B, East Lansing, MI), CashBack+ users are projected to earn between $91 and $190 annually, with rewards averaging 8-10% per purchase — far exceeding typical credit card cashback rates.
What differentiates this innovation from competitors?
Unlike most cashback platforms, CashBack+ is fully integrated within credit unions’ digital banking environments, eliminating friction and keeping members engaged. It supports both debit and credit transactions, ensuring broader accessibility. Additionally, CashBack+ provides a revenue stream for credit unions, outpacing debit interchange fees. The platform has already been adopted by leading credit unions, including Golden 1 Credit Union ($19.6B, Sacramento, CA), Suncoast Credit Union ($18.4B, Tampa, FL), and MSUFCU, with proven results in increasing digital engagement, transaction volume, and member satisfaction. By combining ease of use, high-value rewards, and seamless integration, CashBack+ stands out as the most effective cashback solution tailored specifically for credit unions.
Pulsate
Describe your innovation.
Pulsate’s Opportunities Engine transforms digital banking into an active engagement channel, helping financial institutions build lasting, profitable relationships in a mobile-first world. By leveraging real-time behavioral data, the platform delivers personalized, contextual offers directly within an FI’s banking app — where members are already managing their finances.
Key capabilities include:
- Next-best engagement: AI-driven campaign recommendations with pre-built creative and audience targeting.
- Engagement summary: Actionable insights into user trends and campaign impact.
- Opportunities file: Lists of high-intent users for outreach via digital campaigns or outbound calls.
- Seamless data integrations: Connects with core banking systems, CRMs, and fintech solutions.
With Pulsate, FIs can cut through digital noise to deliver timely, relevant offers — from debit card incentives to loan preapprovals — strengthening relationships and increasing engagement, deposits, and lending.
What opportunity or challenge does it address?
With 90% of consumers preferring to bank from their phones, community FIs are at risk of losing 90% of growth opportunities to big banks that dominate digital mindshare. Without in-branch interactions, members miss out on tailored product recommendations, and traditional outreach methods like email often go ignored.
Pulsate bridges this gap by enabling FIs to proactively engage members inside the banking app — where trust is highest — with hyper-personalized, data-driven micro-engagements that keep them top of mind and therefore top of wallet.
How does it increase member value?
Pulsate enhances the digital banking experience by delivering:
- Timely, relevant engagement: Members receive the right offers at the right time, creating a more intuitive and seamless experience.
- Stronger financial well-being: Personalized recommendations help members make smarter financial decisions.
- Convenience and trust: Unlike email or SMS, in-app messaging ensures secure, non-intrusive engagement within a channel members already use.
- Better financial outcomes: By responding to members’ real-time behaviors, FIs increase adoption of high-value products like loans, deposits, and credit cards.
What differentiates this innovation from competitors?
Pulsate delivers engagement where it matters most — inside the digital banking app. Unlike generic email campaigns or generic notifications, Pulsate’s real-time, behavior-based messaging ensures higher visibility, more relevance, and greater response rates.
By leveraging an FI’s own data, Pulsate anticipates member needs, making interactions feel intuitive, not intrusive. No other platform offers the same depth of personalization, multi-channel reach, and seamless banking integration, positioning Pulsate as the premier engagement solution for community FIs.
Spiral
Describe your innovation.
Members have a lot of options. On average, every household has five accounts across various financial institutions. Members constantly evaluate who provides the greatest value, trust, and personal service in today’s competitive market.
Spiral is the award-winning platform that enables credit unions to grow deposits, increase engagement, and build deep member relationships — making them the primary institution for savings, loans, cards, and more. By turning member engagement into an emotional connection, credit unions can become the go-to choice for your members’ financial needs.
What opportunity or challenge does it address?
With 73% of community financial institutions concerned about losing deposits to bigger banks and fintechs, standing out has never been more critical. As interest rates decline and 80% of recent homebuyers consider refinancing, growing deposits and deepening member engagement is key to meeting loan demand.
Spiral empowers credit unions to win and retain members, grow deposits and loans, and empower millions of people to build better lives and support their communities.
How Spiral helps credit unions:
- Boost member engagement to deepen relationships.
- Increase card transactions and fee income.
- Grow deposits from members.
- Become the primary financial institution (primacy).
- Expand savings account penetration and wallet share.
- Drive charitable donations and strengthen nonprofit partnerships to attract deposits.
How does it increase member value?
With Spiral, members can:
- Swipe. Save. Impact: Save money and achieve community impact easily with everyday purchases.
- Easily save for life’s dreams: Get personalized insights, build easy savings habits, and save automatically without thinking about it.
- Be community heroes: Help other people and achieve community impact easily with each transaction. Donate to favorite charities and manage all charitable giving from their digital banking.
What differentiates this innovation from competitors?
Spiral stands out by combining seamless user experience, financial wellness, and community impact into turnkey, fully personalized experiences within digital banking that drive proven business impact for credit unions.
Key Differentiators:
- All-in-one engagement platform that engages members through their entire banking journey (savings, loans, giving).
- Savings combined with community impact: The only solution that seamlessly integrates savings with giving, empowering members to support causes they care about.
- Superior user experience and easy enrollment with gamified member experiences: Interactive digital widgets and pop-ups that keep members actively engaged while growing deposits and card usage.
- Customizable and turnkey: Credit unions can personalize impact and savings areas, ensuring alignment with their mission—all seamlessly embedded within their existing online banking.
Proven results:
- Spiral’s clients achieved 500,000+ savings transactions in seven months.
- Spiral’s clients achieved on average 15% higher monthly deposits, 30% more monthly card transactions, and 15% higher digital engagement.
- Hundreds of thousands of dollars saved and donated via Spiral’s digital banking experiences.