CU 2.0 Podcast Episode 392 Lamont Black on the Credit Union of the Future - with AI and Stablecoins

February 18, 2026·40 min·3 clips

Lamont Black reveals why credit unions must embrace AI and stablecoins to survive a $33 trillion payment shift.

1. CU 2.0 Podcast host Robert McGarvey interviews Dr. Lamont Black, a Filene Fellow for Credit Union of the Future, finance professor at DePaul University, and founder of Wide Open Ventures. 2. Black identifies himself as an optimist about credit unions' future, arguing they will continue with the same core 'people helping people' mission while adopting AI and stablecoin technology. 3. The episode's central thesis is that credit unions — especially those under $1 billion in assets — are not adopting AI as widely as they should, and are about to face a more urgent stablecoin challenge. 4. McGarvey observes that below $1 billion in assets, AI adoption is largely absent; Black confirms this matches Filene survey data and attributes it to education gaps, board-level fear, and organizational culture rather than capability gaps. 5. Black's company Wide Open Ventures focuses on helping credit unions create AI risk policies as a first step — establishing a 'secure sandbox' before moving to creative applications. 6. Black pushes back on the stereotype that older credit union boards are resistant to new technology, citing a board member in his early 80s — a retired Army veteran — who was pushing the executive team to adopt Microsoft Copilot for reviewing board packets. 7. Black explains how he entered the credit union space in 2021 through NASCUS president Brian Knight, initially presenting on Bitcoin, before expanding into AI and more recently stablecoins. 8. The Genius Act of July 2025 is identified as a turning point that shifted stablecoins from speculative to urgent: half of Black's speaking invitations are now stablecoin, half AI, compared to almost entirely AI in the prior two years. 9. Black distinguishes stablecoins from Bitcoin on two key dimensions: price stability (pegged to the dollar, not speculative) and KYC/AML compliance built into the Genius Act framework, removing the 'criminal use case' concern. 10. Stablecoin transaction volume in 2025 was approximately $33 trillion — a figure Black uses to frame the scale of the infrastructure already being built. 11. Black argues stablecoin merchant fees will compress from roughly 3% for card transactions to closer to 1% or below, representing a competitive disruption potential comparable to the shift from VHS to DVD rather than a simple margin compression. 12. The 'Prime Day 2027' thought experiment asks credit union executives to consider what happens to their interchange revenue if Amazon issues Amazon coin and incentivizes its use on Prime Day — Black calls this a 'material' hit for some credit unions. 13. Both Amazon and Walmart are confirmed by Black as actively pursuing stablecoin issuance, with Walmart pushing Congress for more interchange flexibility simultaneously. 14. Black's revenue model for credit unions involves on-ramp fees (fiat to stablecoin) and off-ramp fees (stablecoin back to fiat), competing with Venmo and Zelle for peer-to-peer transfer volume. 15. He identifies existing vendors in the credit union stablecoin space — Metallicus, Bank Social, StableCore — and notes the MDC/Circle/TruStage coalition exploring a credit union industry stablecoin. 16. St. Cloud Federal Credit Union in Minnesota is cited as a credit union that has already issued its own stablecoin, with Black predicting several industry-level stablecoin options will emerge in 2026. 17. Black's practical recommendation is for credit union executives to personally buy some USDC on Coinbase — an experiential learning approach he has used in room exercises where executives transferred stablecoin to each other and watched the transaction appear on a public blockchain. 18. McGarvey notes his own Bitcoin holdings are up approximately 150% and acknowledges the skin-in-the-game learning value Black describes. 19. Finance professionals, credit union executives, and fintech practitioners who want a practical overview of stablecoin strategy for cooperative financial institutions will find this episode directly useful. 20. Listeners seeking general cryptocurrency investment advice or who are not in the financial services industry will find the episode too narrowly focused on credit union operations.

As heard by us

A blunt look at how AI and stablecoins could reshape credit union payments.

The episode treats the future of credit unions as a practical payments problem, not a branding debate. It moves cleanly from AI to Bitcoin to stablecoins, and it is most convincing when those ideas are tied to merchant pressure, payment rails, and the squeeze from interchange…

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Want the credit union future translated without the usual fog?

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