“Proceed as if success is inevitable.”
I didn’t steal that from a startup pitch deck, although our board chair does love this phrase. This is more than a cute mantra or an executive’s wishful thinking; it’s potent survival strategy. The way money moves is changing faster than most credit unions can convene a committee, and if you wait for the perfect moment, you’ll find you’ve been cut out of the picture altogether.
When someone in a CU boardroom still asks, “When will digital assets go mainstream?” I want to laugh. Walmart is adding Bitcoin to rewards via their OnePay neo-banking app. PayPal is offering 3.7% on its PYUSD stablecoin balances. Square lets millions of merchants accept Bitcoin. MoneyGram is rolling out USDC wallets in Colombia. That’s not fringe. That’s infrastructure.
If those crypto rails don’t funnel value back through your institution (and they won’t), they funnel deposits, transactions, and member control to someone else. Deposits continue to bleed out, loans dry up, and your relevance shrinks.
Here’s the real problem: it’s not about the technology stack, it’s about data, control, and relationships. Every time a member moves money into someone else’s wallet or exchange, you lose more than dollars. You lose behavioral data, transaction history, and the power to remain the hub of your members’ financial lives. Those third-party platforms will use that data to lend, reward, and retain consumers. And they will do it all with a playbook you wrote.
Find a partner that’s not just focused on integration, but on infrastructure that helps institutions keep value local. The CU Digital Asset Vault (the version built by St. Cloud FCU on top of Coin2Core®) is a concrete example of that. It isn’t the only non-traditional revenue play, but it is one of many powerful tools in a broader strategy to let any institution “connect to the network switch” of distributed ledger technologies. You build the bridge. You own the rails. You generate the relevance from your modern product and service offerings.
St. Cloud’s use of that infrastructure to issue Cloud Dollar (CLDUSD) isn’t a vanity project. It’s a statement: we can issue stablecoins anchored in local trust, enable digital asset utility, and preserve the cooperative model; all without handing our members’ data to external platforms.
In the digital asset space, we used to talk about five-year horizons. Well, five years have passed and here we are. In recent months, stablecoins have migrated from being just concepts, to finding themselves on corporate balance sheets, and now threatening the existence of the card networks altogether. Fall behind in this seismic shift and while your membership may continue to trust your institution, if you aren’t offering the real-time, low-cost conveniences they demand, you will lose your integral role in their financial lives.
Of course, many credit unions will respond by bolting on third-party vendors and creating data silos: some wallet app here, a crypto portal there, maybe a partnership or two. That’s exactly how you get fragmentation, operational debt, and a disconnected member experience. The wiser path is harder but more rewarding: build from core out, eliminate vendor silos, and embed experiences people actually trust and use. Don’t just lease the use of the modern money rails; build them and put them to work for your institution.
This isn’t aimless, curiosity-driven innovation, it’s mission-critical continuity. Credit unions were founded to keep value circulating in communities instead of squeezing it through Wall Street and the big banks. That purpose hasn’t changed, only the medium. Whether your focus is cannabis banking, multicultural inclusion, or enabling Bitcoin in-accounts, the ‘why’ remains the same: protect people, empower communities, keep value where it belongs—in your local community!
Yes, regulation matters. But waiting for perfect clarity is the kind of excuse that yields obsolescence. The GENIUS Act, CLARITY Act, and FASB’s guidance (ASU 2023-08) already usher in fair value accounting and more transparent disclosures for crypto assets. Institutions that move now will shape the ruleset, not be hobbled by it.
Strategy isn’t about predicting outcomes. It’s about deciding what moves to make when early predictions fail. If you want to keep money local, you won’t outsource the rails, the data, or the member experience. You’ll build or partner in a way that never gives away control—of your members PII, money, and transaction data.
Credit unions still could matter. But only if they act now to control the flow of value, not watch value slip through their fingers. The rails are already in use, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars in transactions per day. The trains are running. Are you ready to connect your credit union to the rails of modern money? For the sake of this noble industry, we certainly hope so!
