What Actually Gets AI Buy-In at a Credit Union

Ankur Patel interviews Youssi Farag, CFO at WEOKIE Federal Credit Union.<br /><br />📩 Subscribe to the Main Street AI Newsletter: https://multimodal.beehiiv.com/subscribe?utm_source=podcast&amp;utm_medium=description&amp;utm_campaign=podcast<br /><br />WEOKIE Federal Credit Union is a $1.5B institution where Youssi's seat covers finance and accounting, compliance, and commercial lending all at once. Her argument is that AI only sticks when you start from a real problem, put IT, compliance, legal, and the frontline in the same room, and hold vendors to a date instead of accepting "it's on the roadmap."<br /><br />Guest: Youssi Farag, CFO, WEOKIE Federal Credit Union<br />Host: Ankur Patel, CEO &amp; Founder, Multimodal<br /><br />0:00 Introduction: Meet Youssi<br />0:44 What Youssi owns at WEOKIE<br />1:51 Community bank speed vs credit union scale<br />4:43 How technology decisions actually get made<br />6:24 Where AI landed first: fraud, risk, and reporting<br />8:59 Buy, build, or partner<br />11:39 Budgeting for AI<br />13:44 Budget discipline with mid-year pivots<br />16:31 AI in consumer vs commercial lending<br />19:33 How far along WEOKIE is<br />21:39 Member-facing AI and measuring what changed<br />23:35 Vendor green flags and red flags<br />26:17 Structuring an experiment you can pivot out of<br />28:51 Reward seeking vs risk mitigation<br />31:28 Leading vs fast following<br />33:29 Getting the team bought in<br />34:45 What success looks like in three years<br />36:12 Closing