Engage fi Found a $12 Million Hole in a Credit Union - Then Rewired the Org Chart

The first clue was 23 percent. That was the share of branch employees being fully utilized at a $3.5 billion credit union studied by Engage fi. The second clue was louder: 4,000 calls overflowing from the contact center each month, with 15 percent of callers abandoning the queue. Then came the number that made this more than a scheduling problem. The institution sat $6.5 million below its peer-group median on key performance measures.

Engage fi's recommendation was not a chatbot, a branch-closing spree or a motivational poster about omnichannel banking. It proposed reorganizing around what members actually do. Branches were grouped by use, work was redistributed across channels and the organizational map shifted from internal departments toward member actions. Full-time branch utilization moved from 23 percent to 59 percent. The consultancy projected a $12 million improvement in net operating income once the model was fully implemented.

This is the Engage fi proposition in miniature: use unlovely operational data to expose an expensive mismatch, then combine strategy, vendor knowledge and project management until the numbers behave. It serves banks and credit unions, particularly institutions for which a core processor, card network or digital-banking choice is a once-a-decade bet. Those clients are buying advice, but also temporary muscle for decisions that can consume an executive team.

The company on the buyer's side

Jennifer Addabbo and James Guild founded the business in 2014 as CU Engage. Both knew the vendor side of financial technology. Addabbo had worked at FIS and PSCU, helping institutions shape digital strategy and select technology partners; Guild had held senior roles at Fiserv, Open Solutions and PSCU. Their opening was an information imbalance. A processor negotiates contracts every day. A community bank may negotiate its core once in a generation.

The company inventories what an institution owns, interviews the people who use it, translates aspirations into requirements, runs evaluations and RFPs, compares economics, negotiates terms and, increasingly, manages the conversion. Its coverage now spans payments, digital banking, core systems, integrated communications, CRM, AI, strategic planning, M&A and performance benchmarking. The job is part procurement, part operating design and part adult supervision for a technology migration.

That last part matters because the first thing to fail is often connective tissue, not the institution itself. Kennebunk Savings had used the same core for more than 30 years. The system had trouble integrating with other applications, workflows had grown inefficient and vendor service had disappointed. When renewal approached, more than 50 employees joined discovery sessions. Engage fi helped the bank evaluate a new core, digital platform, payments network and debit/ATM provider, then negotiated the agreements.

Kennebunk reported more than $8 million in savings across the newly negotiated contracts. One-time payments incentives rose more than 226 percent, net interchange income increased 66.25 percent and debit-network fees fell 85.6 percent. Those are client-reported case-study results, not a promise that every renewal contains a buried yacht. They do show the attraction of a consultant with comparable pricing and enough category fluency to know which clause deserves a fight.

The rewards program hiding in a contract

Bayer Heritage Federal Credit Union supplies an even tidier story. Its old rewards program had been phased out because the cost no longer produced enough member value. Engage fi reviewed processing, networks, branding and a tangle of contracts that did not expire together. The reported outcome included a 36 percent increase in interchange income, a 72 percent reduction in debit-network fees, 276 percent more incentives and 36 percent lower processing fees.

The fun detail is what the economics unlocked. The savings and incentives were sufficient to fund a new debit and credit cashback program with 100 percent redemption. The contract stopped being administrative plumbing and became a customer product. That is a useful way to think about Engage fi's business model: project fees are paid by the institution, while the case for hiring the firm is measured in savings, revenue lift, reduced risk and executive time. Engage fi does not publish a menu of fees, and large transformation work is scoped to the institution.

What changed their mind

Consulting decks rarely admit fear, but migrations are made of it. At OceanAir Federal Credit Union, the team considered a self-service card-processing model and worried that a small institution could not operate it. Engage fi did something more persuasive than adding slides: it introduced OceanAir to an even smaller client that had made a similar model work. The peer described the reality. OceanAir's team aligned around the option and proceeded through vendor selection and negotiation.

That move reveals a less obvious asset. A consultancy accumulates pattern recognition, but it also accumulates a network of operators willing to tell another operator where the bodies are buried. Market benchmarks answer “what should this cost?” Peer evidence answers “can people like us survive the change?” Both are forms of leverage.

From advice to machinery

The company has been turning repeated consulting work into software. Its 360fi Workflow product configures bank and credit-union processes around their core systems. DataFusion centralizes data collection, validation, migration, analytics and visualization. The latter arrived through Engage fi's December 2025 acquisition of Intellectual Dimensions, a Minnesota company founded in 2001 that had served more than 200 institutions.

The acquisition made strategic sense because a conversion consultant eventually gets tired of watching teams clean, scrub, map and validate the same kinds of data by hand. Engage fi said clients had already used the acquired platform for 18 months and reported faster implementations and better accuracy. Advice tells a bank how to cross the ravine; automation makes the bridge less wobbly.

This expansion also shifts Engage fi's place in the market. It still competes with specialist advisers, large consultancies and an institution's own procurement or project office. But it now mixes independent guidance with execution software and managed migration work. In October 2025, co-founder Addabbo moved to executive chair and longtime operating leader Andres Pasantes became president and CEO. Two months later came the acquisition. By April 2026, State Employees' Credit Union - more than $59 billion in assets and 2.9 million members - had selected Engage fi for a multi-year technology, operations and enterprise transformation.

The bit worth stealing

A bank cannot copy Engage fi's benchmark database overnight. It can copy the choreography. Start before the renewal clock becomes a weapon. Inventory every contract and dependency. Establish the current economics before watching a demo. Invite the people who touch the system into discovery. Score real workflows, not stage-managed features. Negotiate service levels, data access, implementation duties, termination rights and conversion support with the same attention given to headline price.

The other steal is timing. Engage fi's story moved from expertise to repeatable process to software, in that order. A founder looking at a service business should notice the sequence. The product was not invented in a brainstorm about “the future of banking.” It emerged from years of watching the same operational friction recur.

There is also a sober lesson about cost. An adviser cannot manufacture leverage when the underlying contract is tiny, and savings alone do not rescue a badly governed program. The return depends on enough addressable spend, a genuine willingness to compare alternatives and a client team capable of acting on the recommendation. A favorable agreement still needs clean migration data, trained employees and a launch plan. Procurement is not transformation; it merely decides which promises the transformation team will be asked to keep.

Engage fi's three consecutive Inc. 5000 appearances suggest there are plenty of institutions with the harder version of the problem. In 2022, the company reported 187 clients, 324 projects, more than $336 million in client savings and an NPS of 86. Its current site describes a team of more than 95 banking professionals and, in 2026, more than 2,700 successful engagements. The figures have grown, but the premise has stayed pleasantly plain: in financial technology, the glamorous screen is downstream of a contract, a data model and a project plan.

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