How Global Credit Union is Redefining Banking Operations

Global Credit Union is proving that scale and vision are pivotal to driving digital innovation. The US$12bn financial institution is deploying AI and automation technologies to serve its 770,000 members worldwide..

Lori Moore, Senior Vice President of Technology Engineering at Global Credit Union, leads this transformation with an unconventional philosophy. Rather than pursuing technology for its own sake, she champions what she calls “people-first automation”.

She joined Global Credit Union through an enterprise architecture role, initially knowing little about the credit union industry. Now, she’s thriving in a finance environment she loves, applying her technical expertise to deliver value. “Here, we are using these amazing technologies for the good of our members,” she says. “It’s rooted in that member experience and changing lives. I enjoy using skills for good.”

Enhancing rather than replacing human services

Lori’s approach to AI centres on augmenting human capabilities, rather than replacing workers. Her automation initiatives have delivered measurable results while preserving the human element crucial to financial services.

For example, the credit union’s robotics programme alone has generated US$250,000 worth of value in the last year: a figure Lori expects to double in 2025 as automation expands across operations.

Her integration platform, built on Salesforce’s MuleSoft technology, processes 300 million transactions annually, delivering US$1.2m worth of value back to the credit union, which gets passed directly to members.

This philosophy reflects the cooperative structure that defines credit union operations, where surplus value returns to member-owners rather than external shareholders.

As well as this, Global’s AI operations programme has saved 62,000 hours while performing 381,000 automated actions in 2025 so far alone. These systems handle routine tasks that would otherwise consume significant staff time. The automation strategy focuses on eliminating context switching – the productivity drain caused by constantly shifting between different tasks. Lori believes humans perform poorly at context switching despite thinking otherwise.

“Automation can provide context to member service centre specialists by giving them information about the member,” she explains, giving an example. “It means you don’t have that ‘please hold on while I pull up your record’ piece. The 10 seconds of waiting for somebody to find you in the system? You can actually get that information up straight away and on your dashboard, already there and waiting.”

On top of pre-populating member information on service representatives’ dashboards, the systems can even flag potential issues before members mention them, enabling proactive, rather than reactive, service.

“It also allows us to deliver information straight up to our members,” she continues. “In our member service centre, we provide pending transactions and current balance to our members automatically using this technology, reducing the amount of calls to our member service centre by 26%. It’s a huge amount, equivalent to freeing up seven people to shift over and work on problems our members need help solving where you need a person involved.”

Transforming experiences across the board

For Lori and Global Credit Union, it’s not just about improving member experience. Automation is empowering its staff, too. Thanks to automation improvements, staff can research for immediate status updates rather than manually searching files, allowing them to focus entirely on member needs – benefitting people on both sides.

Lori likens this technological assistance as “having an enthusiastic intern at your shoulder, helping you out, grabbing things for you”. The technology handles information retrieval while people provide the irreplaceable human touches, as well as interpretation and decision-making. 

This human-centred approach extends to the credit union’s AI committee. Lori deliberately balanced technical representation with perspectives from human resources, business lines, legal and compliance teams. 

She explains: “We’ve balanced it out with people from HR, business lines and the likes of legal and compliance who all come together to ask these questions. What I like about it is everybody is in this to try and create solutions the right way rather than being set in their own ways. It’s been really nice to have a strong foundation so we can ask ethical questions and make sure that what we’re doing adheres to our values.”

Cloud architecture enables resilience and innovation

Global Credit Union operates what Lori calls a “hybrid data centre structure”, combining on-premise infrastructure with cloud services, allowing workloads to run where they perform most effectively. Some technologies, Lori explains, benefit from physical network proximity, while others thrive in cloud environments. Global Credit Union’s architecture connects these systems all while maintaining security and performance standards for its members.

“It allows you to use workloads the way that they want to be used,” she explains. “Some technologies really like to be together on a physical network, some really like to be in the cloud. Now we’re able to connect them, it’s changed how we think about architecture, infrastructure and security. 

“On top of that, you also have this ability to build things very quickly. All of a sudden, we can provision and build new environments, do innovative things without having to go find a bunch of cables, connect something up, test it and all of that. It’s really changed what infrastructure is and what it's going to be. I think about it now as a flexible digital fabric that just supports everything that we do.”

This flexibility has fundamentally changed how the organisation thinks about architecture, infrastructure and security. The cloud-first approach enables rapid provisioning of new environments and innovation initiatives. On top of this, the transformation has contradicted conventional wisdom about cloud economics, as industry experts typically warn that cloud migration rarely delivers cost savings – however, Lori’s experience proves otherwise.

“We have definitely seen that and we have been able to simplify things in completely different ways,” she reveals. “It's just given us a whole new lease on infrastructure than we never had before. 

“I’d say, if people are starting to look at cloud and they feel it’s going to be too expensive, just think about the way you’re doing it because you're probably doing a whole bunch of things right now that you can simplify once you hit the cloud.”

Partnerships core to transformation 

Global Credit Union’s technology partnerships reflect Lori’s collaborative approach to innovation. The organisation uses Salesforce’s Tableau platform for data analytics, maintaining this relationship for approximately five years.

Her primary Salesforce interaction involves MuleSoft, the enterprise integration platform processing those 300 million annual transactions. This partnership extends beyond typical vendor relationships to collaborative development and support.

“They have stepped us through every step of the way from ‘let’s put together a proof of concept’ to where we are now,” Lori explains.

She emphasises feeling “completely supported”, with teams receiving extensive interaction and connectivity as the partnership model enables confident decision-making and continuous improvement in service delivery.

Lori believes the strongest partnerships create mutual advancement where “two companies come together and we make each other better”. She seeks relationships where collaboration produces results exceeding individual capabilities.

Partnership remains embedded in credit union DNA, she adds, as credit unions originated from groups pooling resources in proverbial shoeboxes, fostering natural collaboration instincts that extend to modern technology relationships.

Looking toward self-healing infrastructure

For Lori, her strategic roadmap looking ahead includes developing infrastructure capable of automatic disaster response. She looks forward to hybrid data centres that self-heal during disruptions like earthquakes – something that poses a real risk in a state like Alaska.

“I want a hybrid data centre that self-heals and just says: ‘Oh, there’s a problem. Let’s shift everything over,’” she explains.

This automated resilience is becoming crucial as Global Credit Union transforms the capabilities of its 24/7 support operations, particularly now as the organisation serves members across not only every US state but around the world.

With this in mind, Lori plans to integrate automation, integration infrastructure and AI teams into a unified technology engineering programme to best serve both Global Credit Union’s staff and members. She wants this consolidated approach to function “like a multi-tool of solutions that we can bring to big problems”.

Rather than forcing predetermined solutions, she prefers flexibility allowing optimal tool selection for each challenge. As modern technology tools increasingly interconnect, she feels this allows for making integrated approaches more effective than isolated implementations.

Cultural transformation remains equally important to Lori’s vision as she seeks to model innovative, flexible and agile approaches across the entire credit union, rather than confining them to technology departments.

Her centres of excellence philosophy involves building technology then sharing it organisation-wide, with this democratisation including citizen developer programmes enabling business users to tackle problems with no-code tools. Global Credit Union’s innovation programmes are modelled on entrepreneurship and are a place where staff can pitch ideas and receive funding for experimentation, which Lori believes formalises innovation rather than relegating it to unofficial “under the table” activities.

“How do I bring more people into the fold rather than making these technologies just something that sits in Technology Engineering?” she asks.

Lori’s vision already manifests through two AI agents supporting frontline staff in member service centres and branches. These systems answer routine questions using existing training materials, enabling staff to maintain member focus. “We can answer the majority of questions that people have without taking them out of their line of sight,” she concludes.