By Ray Birch
PITTSBURGH— At Clearview Federal Credit Union, artificial intelligence isn’t being treated as a moonshot or a marketing slogan. It’s increasingly being viewed as something more practical: the next everyday workplace tool—closer to the internet than a science experiment.
That’s how Raymond George, CIO at $2.1-billion Clearview FCU, describes the credit union’s approach as it rolls AI deeper into operations, from member-service pattern recognition and fraud monitoring to internal productivity, policy work and loan decisioning. The goal, George said, hasn’t been to chase a single “big bang” automation project, but to steadily make teams more efficient, better informed and faster to act across the organization.
Clearview, which serves members across southwestern Pennsylvania and has 27 locations in the region, began as many institutions did—by seeing employees experiment with tools like Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT, then moving to put structure around that use. George said the credit union established controls around Copilot, added ChatGPT site licenses, and then leaned heavily into training, including boot-camp style prompt instruction for managers and selected staff before expanding usage through town halls and shared internal examples.
From there, AI use cases spread in a distinctly credit union way: less flashy, more operational. George said teams in member experience are using it to analyze inbound member issues and identify emerging themes. HR is using it for job descriptions. Staff are using it to speed up presentations, emails and document creation. During audits or policy reviews, he said, AI has become a quick assist for updating language and organizing material that used to take significantly longer. At Clearview, he said, the expectation now is often not whether staff will use AI, but why they wouldn’t.
That kind of steady adoption tracks with what broader industry research is showing. In Alkami’s 2025 Retail Digital Sales & Service Maturity Model, 42% of the most digitally mature banks and credit unions reported actively using generative AI somewhere in the organization, versus 26% of the least mature institutions—evidence that AI is increasingly becoming part of the widening gap between digital leaders and laggards. The same research found the most digitally mature institutions reporting up to five times higher annual average revenue growth than less mature peers.
At Clearview, one of the more consequential applications is in fraud and risk monitoring. George said the credit union is using AI-driven routines to analyze events such as password changes, email updates and phone number changes—activity that can signal account takeover or scam patterns. In one example, he said, a phone number change followed by a Zelle transaction can be a strong red flag, and Clearview has tied some of that pattern recognition into robotic process automation to flag or shut down accounts for review. He also said the credit union is exploring how AI can be used to compare remote deposit capture check images against metadata to identify anomalies that may suggest fraud.
Adding Zest AI
Clearview is also using AI in lending through its implementation of Zest AI for automated underwriting, which George said enables the credit union to evaluate more data elements than a human underwriter can realistically process and approve loans more quickly. He also pointed to Zest AI’s LuLu tool as useful for peer comparisons, 5300-style analysis and portfolio trend work.
George was careful not to oversell the results in hard percentages. Clearview, he said, has not built its AI strategy around automating an entire department or clocking a precise “35% more efficient” type of metric. Instead, he said, the strongest proof point may be behavioral: license requests keep rising as staff see what peers are doing, and internal use cases keep multiplying. That has pushed Clearview to start organizing and centralizing prompts, workflows and emerging agents so departments aren’t reinventing the same tools separately.
The next phase, George said, is likely to be more ambitious but still familiar to many institutions: combining its Azure environment, robotic process automation and quality-assurance efforts, while building a more interactive internal assistant off the credit union’s knowledge base.
He was quick to note that internal chatbots and agentic-style pilots are hardly unique in the market. But his larger message to peers was that waiting on the sidelines may be the bigger risk. AI, he said, should be approached with the same mindset financial institutions eventually adopted toward the internet: put guardrails around it, train people to use it responsibly, and then recognize it as a business tool that is not going away.
Section: Standard
Word Count: 905
Copyright Holder: CUToday.info
Copyright Year: 2026
Is Based On:
URL: https://www.cutoday.info/THE-feature/Clearview-FCU-Is-Showing-How-AI-May-Reshape-Credit-Unions-One-Workflow-At-A-Time