The payments landscape isn't waiting for anyone. Faster rails, stablecoins, mounting fraud risk, and the slow erosion of interchange revenue are all converging at once, and credit union leaders are being asked to make consequential decisions with incomplete information and shrinking runways.
Dr. Henry Kim, a fellow at the Filene Research Institute and professor at York University's Schulich School of Business, recently presented a data-informed framework drawn from onboarding conversations with credit unions and service providers across the industry. His message was clear: the pace is unsettling, but the playbook is knowable, if you're disciplined about the fundamentals.
Here are the four themes that should be at the top of every credit union leader's agenda.
1. Member Data & Personalization: Payments Are More Than Transactions
Your members may have a handful of major financial moments each year: a home purchase, a car loan, a big life event. But they're executing dozens, sometimes hundreds, of payment transactions every single month. That data is a goldmine for understanding member behavior, anticipating needs, and deepening relationships.
The problem is that many credit unions can't access it in any unified, actionable way.
As Dr. Kim put it, the infrastructure simply isn't there yet. Payment data lives in silos, across systems that weren't designed to talk to each other. That makes it nearly impossible to identify what he calls "poignant moments": the kinds of transactions that signal a member is ready for a new product, a financial conversation, or a deeper engagement with their credit union.
The strategic imperative here is clear: close the data gap. Credit unions that can aggregate and analyze payment behavior will be positioned to personalize at scale, demonstrate tangible value to members, and earn the kind of loyalty that keeps members from wandering toward competitors. Those that can't will be flying blind.
The question to ask your team: How well are we capturing and actually using member payment behavior data, and what would it take to improve that by the end of the year?
2. Fraud vs. Speed: The Tension That Limits Everything
If you ask credit union leaders what keeps them up at night, fraud is almost always the answer and it's a legitimate concern. One credit union shared with Dr. Kim that 12% to 16% of all call center volume was driven by card fraud alone. Meanwhile, check fraud is rising even as check volume declines.
But here's the harder truth: fraud concern may be outpacing actual fraud losses at many institutions. When Dr. Kim looks at this issue through a purely economic lens, he hypothesizes that the perceived risk often exceeded the documented reality. That gap matters, because fraud anxiety is the primary reason real-time payment limits stay artificially low, and low limits mean slower money movement, reduced member satisfaction, and missed competitive ground.
This isn't an argument for recklessness but an argument for precision. There is a real and costly tension between the speed that modern payment rails make possible and the fraud controls that organizations feel they need to maintain. Resolving that tension requires data, not instinct.
The practical path forward: separate your actual fraud loss data from your perceived risk. Set thresholds that are defensible on the numbers, not just on anxiety. If your fraud incidence is consistently running below your stated tolerance threshold, you may be leaving both capability and member experience on the table.
The question to ask your team: Is there a net benefit to our current fraud controls and the impacts they have on our member experience or do we need to recalibrate based on what the data tells us?
3. Build vs. Buy: The Strategic Complexity Nobody Warned You About
The payments vendor landscape is, in a word, overwhelming. When Dr. Kim first surveyed it upon partnering with Filene, he found it surprisingly complex: a dense ecosystem of rail providers, fraud tools, payment hubs, FinTech partners, CUSOs, and corporate credit unions, each with their own value propositions, contract structures, and dependency risks.
Credit union leaders are spending significant time and energy navigating this landscape. And too many, Dr. Kim observed, are making capability decisions reactively, adding what vendors offer rather than what strategy demands.
The build vs. buy question isn't just about cost or capability. It's about strategic coherence. Who you partner with, for how long, and under what terms shapes your institution's ability to move, adapt, and differentiate for years to come. Single-vendor dependencies are a real risk. Underutilized relationships with CUSOs and corporate credit unions are a real opportunity, and FinTechs, while attractive, require clear-eyed evaluation.
The recommended starting point: document your payments vendor map: what you own, what you've outsourced, and where your single-vendor exposure creates strategic risk. If that map doesn't exist yet, creating it is a 30-day exercise that will pay dividends regardless of what decisions come next.
The question to ask your team: Do we have a documented, board-level view of our payments vendor architecture, and does it reflect an intentional strategy or an accumulation of reactive decisions?
4. Stablecoins & Deposit Risk: The Open Question You Can't Afford to Ignore
Stablecoins are no longer a theoretical concern. With legislation like the GENIUS Act moving through the regulatory landscape, stablecoin rails are becoming real payments infrastructure, and the implications for credit union deposit bases and payment volumes are genuinely uncertain.
Dr. Kim was very candid on this point: the most authoritative voices in economics and monetary policy, including the Federal Reserve, the New York Fed, and leading academic researchers, do not agree on whether stablecoins will trigger deposit flight. Some argue deposits are sticky enough to withstand stablecoin adoption. Others contend that even without direct yield, the movement of funds in and out of stablecoin wallets will constrain the capital available for lending. The honest answer is that no one knows for certain.
That uncertainty itself is the signal. When four of the most credible institutions in global finance can't reach consensus, any vendor or partner who presents stablecoins as a settled matter deserves healthy skepticism.
What credit unions should be doing now is not predicting the outcome; it's preparing for multiple scenarios. What happens to your liquidity if members begin moving funds to stablecoin wallets? How would your payments volume shift if members conduct everyday transactions outside your rails? Has your board had a substantive conversation about stablecoin risk in the context of your deposit and payments strategy?
Dr. Kim frames stablecoins not as a revolution, but as an evolution: the latest chapter in a centuries-long effort to replicate the convenience of cash across distance. That framing matters. If it's evolutionary, then your team's decades of experience in credit union finance is an asset, not a liability. The patterns are familiar, even if the technology is new.
The question to ask your team: Are we prepared to brief our board on stablecoin risk relative to our deposit base and payments strategy, and if not, what do we need to learn first?
The Overarching Principle: Be Deliberate
Across all four of these themes, Dr. Kim returned to a consistent refrain: when the path forward is unclear, the answer is not to freeze, and it is not to sprint. It's to collect data, form hypotheses, and move deliberately.
The payments industry is full of "flashy coins": technologies that generate so much excitement that leaders lose their frame of reference and can't evaluate them clearly. Quantum computing, AI, Crypto, each wave creates pressure to act before you're ready. The antidote isn't cynicism, it's discipline.
Credit unions that benchmark their own payments maturity honestly, across member data usage, strategic integration, technology adoption, and fraud prevention sophistication, will be better positioned to make decisions grounded in reality rather than anxiety or hype.
The evolution is happening, your experience is relevant, and the next move is yours to make.
The trends shaping payments in 2026 and beyond are moving fast, and you don't have to navigate them alone. On May 21, Dr. Kim returns for an exclusive, members-only webinar to share the latest data, emerging findings, and actionable guidance on everything covered here. This is your opportunity to get up-to-date, fully informed, and prepared for what’s next. Join us on May 21, (11CT).
