Consumers have become ever more selective when seeking out low-interest loans and high-interest savings accounts. This competitive climate would seem ripe for credit unions to attract and retain their business—except for having to do more with less. That is, to compete with the marketing programs and rates of larger banks and FinTechs, you’re grappling with slim resources, changing regulations, and having to find the most effective ways to acquire the most digitally savvy generation yet, Gen Z.

Thankfully, AI is leveling the playing field for credit unions. New technologies democratize the use of the tech, once accessible only to large private institutions. CMOs, CXOs, and VPs of marketing are now able to equip their marketing teams with automated marketing AI platforms that are trained specifically on bank communications performance data—so credit unions of all sizes can create more content that is engaging and compliant, faster and better.

Here are just four of the ways that AI and Agentic AI innovations are helping credit unions better acquire, educate, and retain members, while complying with myriad regulations:

Tap into integrations & automation for efficiency

With a little up-front work, such as uploading your brand guidelines and segments, and setting up a library of high-performing content structured for a range of concepts (such as offer, emotion, and narrative), you can be ready to drive results with AI in a few days.

You can quickly start leveraging AI-powered marketing content solutions on most platforms today. Some actually easily integrate with your customer data system/content distribution platforms, so that you can create content within the same platform that you use to deploy across channels.

Other options enable you to do this with a series of tools designed for a specific channel, such as social media, email, web, and push notifications. A handful of solutions also facilitate collaboration between CRM, marketing performance, or marketing operations, and data analytics teams—speeding review of use cases, system assessment, configuration requirements, and campaign plans.

Manually analyzing your campaign performance is time-consuming because of the complex setup, results monitoring, and the back and forth to get legal approvals. This is even harder within campaigns with large workflows, which can make the push for automation at odds with the need to keep content fresh, react to market dynamics, and speed time to market.

Use AI to help with this. Make sure any solution you are adopting can help mitigate this issue—it’s not just about generation, but what you need after that. Use cases that deliver immediate business impact and become more advanced when adding personalization include:

• Triggered campaigns (application abandonment, onboarding, payments)
• Recurring batch campaigns (app adoption, cross-sell, win-back, etc.)
• Single batch campaigns, which adapt to optimize promotions, products,

Trim legal time & speed compliant content creation

The American Bar Association estimates just over 250 attorneys serve in-house at credit unions across the country, with demand for these roles increasing due to complex regulatory environments. This is a small fraction of the 4,500 federally insured credit unions in the U.S.— indicating it’s largely up to outside counsel and marketers themselves to keep pace with changes in state and Federal regulations and ensure consumer-facing communications are compliant.

In fact, a recent report by the Conference of State Bank Supervisors found that the smallest banks reported spending roughly 11% to 15.5% of their payroll on compliance tasks, compared with 6% to 10% at the largest institutions. Credit unions are under immense pressure to get compliance right.

It can take weeks of marketing and legal back and forth to get the creative approved for prime time. Considering the hourly rate for legal counsel in banking (typically around $200/hour), simply getting marketing content out the door comes at a high cost.

For marketers looking to accelerate content reviews for speed-to-market, it’s essential to prioritize compliance throughout the content creation process—not only when it gets to legal. This can be as simple as keeping disclosure libraries and rules for use easily accessible and on hand, so marketers can quickly monitor for noncompliance.

There are AI tools focused purely on improving compliance approval processes with less manual effort. For example, such tools may save a disclosure library’s rules for use and monitoring for anything non-conformant to the defined rules in order to prevent unnecessary human errors going to compliance teams for review.

More advanced AI solutions that balance efficiency with effectiveness were once available only to large banks but are now available for use by mid-size institutions. Such specialized platforms introduce AI into the content review cycle, using agentic AI to assess and resolve content risk without sacrificing marketing performance. These solutions continuously learn from consent orders, public comments, and evolving regulations—refining analysis with every interaction, and providing institutions with smarter, more precise insights over time.

This newfound efficiency quickly pays for itself, driving a better digital customer experience, time and cost savings, and bridging the gap between marketing and compliance teams. Early adopters of these solutions have reduced compliance review times by up to 80 percent, greatly trimming legal costs and providing their customers with more timely, relevant content.

Authentically engage Gen Z

Gen Z (born 1997-2012) is a unique segment with immense spending power, reaching $12 trillion by 2030. Gen Zers are not only digital natives: they have a strong ability to detect manufactured mass communications. To best engage with Gen Z members, credit unions must look past tried and true marketing tactics and lean into authentic, personalized marketing language as well as rich digital experiences and user interfaces.

Think about it this way: your digital experiences and communications should be as personable and human as an in-person experience at a brick-and-mortar branch. This isn’t just about ensuring that you have a variety of digital channels (such as a mobile banking app, website, or online chat function), but that both your brand identity and your understanding of your Gen Z members come through across channels. The language you use when engaging with members is an essential element.

According to Tearsheet, “While most financial institutions struggle with cringe-worthy attempts to sound ‘lit’ or ‘based,’ specialized AI platforms like Persado have cracked the code on authentic Gen Z communication through sophisticated AI that doesn’t just mimic Gen Z speak—it understands what motivates this digitally native, values-driven demographic. Drawing on a trove of performance data from 8 of the top 10 U.S. banks and over 17 billion customer interactions, the platform delivers personalized, emotionally resonant messages that don’t set off Gen Z’s ‘finely-tuned BS detectors.’”

Improve marketing performance and time to market

AI platforms enable bank and credit union marketers and copywriters to easily and quickly generate marketing content, allowing for more timely, personalized customer experiences. Marketers can use zero-party data to focus on targeted audience segments, and even set up specific customer journeys to anticipate customer needs as their financial journey evolves to improve retention rates.

By choosing a platform that is grounded in performance data, marketers can take an even more data-informed, results-driven approach to content creation. After uploading brand guidelines and segments, they can rapidly explore hundreds of content variants, and then automatically analyze and quantify the impact of each word, speeding time to market. If the platform is built on performance data from emotion-aware language, marketers can further personalize messages to drive even greater member engagement — whether that is opening an account, completing a loan application, going paperless, driving referral, or downloading the mobile app, for example.

The business impact is easily measured, as you are comparing metrics of AI-generated messages with the performance of a control variant. The team can understand what truly resonates with customers and seamlessly pivot to optimize creative, driving double-digit improvements in key metrics, such as clicks and conversions.

Let AI work for you

At the end of the day, it’s about acquiring, engaging, educating, and retaining your members. Each piece of content is an opportunity to delight them—underscoring the importance of optimizing marketing content and campaigns for relevance, personalization, and engagement. AI also helps to drive profits that you can pass on to members through better rates, products, and services.

Agentic AI for rapid generation of compliant, high-performing content could, in fact, be the killer AI app of today for credit unions. The good news is that the innovations are already here and now.