Forum Credit Union Bets on Digital Tools to Keep 5,000 Businesses Loyal

PYMNTS Intelligence’s latest collaboration with Velera highlights why the timing matters. The 2025 Credit Union Innovation Readiness Index found that top performers lean on partners to speed innovation and are already delivering a larger share of high‑value products than laggards. The study also flags two pressure points for winning and retaining business relationships: 68% of SMBs that left a credit union say they want online onboarding for new products, and Gen Z’s demand for digital onboarding runs 78% higher than the average consumer.

Forum’s partnership with Apiture aims squarely at those gaps. The credit union has gone live on Apiture’s Business Banking solution for its roughly 5,000 business members and implemented Apiture’s Data Intelligence suite to understand usage and personalize outreach. The platform includes cash‑management tools, payment and transfer options and fraud‑prevention features. It’s the kind of functionality that smaller firms can navigate without training, and that more complex commercial accounts won’t outgrow. Apiture says the rollout is a milestone in Forum’s broader digital transformation.

Andrew Mattingly, Forum’s chief operating officer, framed the change as a pragmatic pivot from building everything in‑house to buying where it matters most for businesses.

“Actually for the consumer side, we do our own home banking and mobile app we have for almost 20 years now,” he told PYMNTS. “But commercial was always too difficult to do… We were at the point with our commercial growth over the last five years that we needed to upgrade to something better… we decided to go out and find the best one that we can because we know with our small businesses, serving them digitally is very important.”

Segmenting The Business

Those 5,000 business relationships are not monolithic. Mattingly breaks them into three bands: roughly 100 “sophisticated” companies that use lines of credit and operate in capital‑intensive fields like construction and electrical contracting; a large middle of small LLCs and sole proprietorships with about 10 employees; and a fast‑growing cohort of 1099 earners and microbusinesses that migrated over from the consumer side. Fewer than one in five need credit at any moment, he said, which makes deposits, payments and day‑to‑day tools the main battleground for engagement.

Personalization for those groups starts with visibility, then turns into guidance. Forum lacked external‑account aggregation in business digital banking; the new platform lets members see all their balances in one view, while giving the credit union a clearer read on cash flows and how products are used (debit versus ACH, for example) to steer customers to better options.

Mattingly said FORUM already receives FedNow payments and is working toward “send,” which could move certain transactions off slower rails once usage data points to the right candidates. Apiture’s Data Intelligence layer adds on‑screen tips and tutorials and supports audience‑specific campaigns, which Forum plans to use for education and cross‑sell as adoption grows.

On competition, Forum sees the fight at the regional and community bank level rather than with national institutions. Larger banks often treat small‑business accounts like consumer relationships with a business overlay, Mattingly suggested; Forum’s stance is to package tools and service around the business itself and keep the interface intuitive enough that owners can self‑serve without a call to the branch.

Digital Transformation Roadmap

The upgrade is part of a longer roadmap. Forum is prioritizing digital account opening across consumer, small business and commercial with a goal of completing the project by year‑end. It aims to open 75% to 80% of accounts in roughly five minutes online by wiring in know‑your‑customer, fraud and other checks. Parallel work includes a new data warehouse that will feed business intelligence into the commercial team and inform a 2026 refresh of business products based on observed behavior and in‑app feedback. The credit union has been “held back” by legacy tools in recent years, Mattingly said, and wants its product set to match what members can now do inside the new digital front end.

The macro backdrop is constructive. PYMNTS Intelligence’s Small Business Growth Monitor shows confidence at a multi‑year high, with 82% of SMBs saying they expect to be operating two years from now, even as costs and labor remain tight. That optimism dovetails with FORUM’s growth plans and with the broader industry thesis that better digital onboarding and targeted guidance can lift retention and deepen relationships.

Mattingly is hearing the same signals locally.

“We are seeing a lot of optimism across all of our different businesses… they feel like that there’s still an opportunity out there,” he said. “Among larger commercial clients there is still a lot of growth in our market… They still [feel] very, very strong.”