From restaurants to retail, industries where customer service is an integral part their business continue to deal with major staffing shortages. This includes financial services and financial institutions, and by extension, credit unions. Securing reliable and long-term frontline help devoted to providing member service was difficult even before the COVID outbreak. Following the tidal wave of closures of physical branches that accompanied pandemic lockdown, many member service representatives left for other positions, or simply never came back. With no end in sight to the staffing crunch, and members demanding a more personalized service experience, credit unions must consider an option many previously thought was too expensive, 'impersonal', and too complex to maintain.

Despite all the excitement around innovations in fintech, larger and more traditional financial institutions are typically a little bit slower to adopt due to their complexity and size. Particularly with artificial intelligence, traditional financial services have always been eager to capture its potential but sluggish to fully implement. However, this has changed rapidly due to the onset of COVID-19. In the past few months, there has been over a 200% increase in mobile banking registrations and an 85% increase in mobile banking activity. This is a trend that is unlikely to change soon.