LAS VEGAS—After a year of progress and learning with the Credit Union Data Exchange (CUDX), Adam Wright, managing director of Operations at CUDX, shares how the organization is scaling its ecosystem, streamlining onboarding, and setting the stage for greater growth.
As CUToday.info reported, CUDX is a new data sharing tool that helps credit unions better compete with big banks and grow market share. CUDX has been built by the Filene Research Institute, Trellance, and a number of forward-leaning credit unions to help CUs break down walls and collaborate nationally on what is designed to be much more than a data warehouse and instead could someday even rival the resources of much larger providers.
“Coming out of the Edge Conference last year, we had a clear goal: streamline onboarding and make it easier for credit unions to join the platform,” Wright said during the Edge 2025 meeting in Las Vegas. “We’ve made real progress—successfully onboarding eight credit unions, with a couple still in progress. Through those experiences, we’ve learned a lot.”
The onboarding process hasn’t been one-size-fits-all. Each credit union has its own infrastructure, protocols, and challenges, especially around data encryption, movement, and integration, Wright explained.
“That diversity has been both a challenge and a learning opportunity,” Wright said. “We’re using those lessons to simplify things going forward. The support of our early-adopters has been critical to moving us toward full production, and we will continue to lean on them this year.”
In December, CUDX brought stakeholders together to assess progress and set clear priorities for 2025. At the top of the list? Growth.
“We’re focused on growing the exchange—by that, I mean getting more credit unions and more members on board,” Wright said. “We’re not just growing in terms of technology capacity—we’ve got that covered—but in participation and the richness of the data that comes with it.”
Currently, 30 credit unions have expressed interest in joining, and the goal is to onboard all of them in 2025. If successful, that would bring CUDX’s reach to over five million credit union members represented on the platform.
“That kind of scale—both in data volume and in geographic and demographic diversity—is what will make the platform truly valuable, not just to our members, but to third parties as well,” Wright noted. “Think of the potential for analytics, insights, and eventually, monetization – creating value for CUs as a non-interest income stream that offsets or even exceeds the cost of participating in CUDX.”