The governed AI layer for credit unions

Turn your core into
the foundation for AI.

Your core has run your credit union for years. It is the system you trust. Cortava extends that foundation to AI. It gives any agent governed access to member data across your core and every other system you run, so AI acts on the whole relationship, not one slice. The data never leaves your environment. You stay in control of all of it.

Design-partner pilot in progress  ·  NCUA-compliant governance  ·  Data stays in your environment
Symitar · Fiserv · FIS
Core banking
Connected
Alkami / Q2
Digital banking platform
Connected
Cortava Gateway™
Ontology · Governed gateway · Whole member
Live
MeridianLink
Loan origination
Connected
Velera / PSCU
Payments & card processing
Connected
The real bottleneck

AI agents are everywhere.
Governed access to your data isn't.

The agents are not the hard part anymore. There is a capable agent for almost every job, and more arrive every month. The hard part is the data. A single member lives across your core, your loan system, your card processor, and your digital banking platform. The average credit union runs a dozen or more vendor systems. No agent can act on the whole member, because no agent can safely reach across all of it.

01
Fragmented stack, fragmented intelligence
Your core holds member records. Your loan system holds the pipeline. Your card processor holds transaction data. No unified view means every AI initiative is partial, and partial AI is dangerous in financial services.
Avg. credit union: a dozen or more vendor systems
02
AI pilots that never reach production
Nearly 1 in 4 credit union technology projects never reaches production. Not because the AI does not work, but because the integration does not. Building one-off connectors for every new AI use case is the most expensive way to fail.
1 in 4 tech projects never deploys
03
NCUA scrutiny is here and AI is next
NCUA's 2026 Supervisory Priorities put AI on the examination agenda. Algorithmic decisioning, fair lending compliance, and model risk are now explicitly examiner concerns. AI without a governed, auditable decision trail is an examination risk.
AI named in NCUA's 2026 priorities
Federation

Your data stays where it lives.
Cortava puts it to work.

Federation is the foundation Cortava is built on: the ontology and every governed agent run on top of it. Your member's full picture is split across every system you run. Cortava brings the computation to your data, not your data to a warehouse: it queries your core, lending, and payment systems together and returns only what your agents need to act on the whole member. No data migration. No vendor lock-in. Data never leaves your environment, and Cortava holds only the model, lineage, and audit, never your member records, so you never become another data silo. Where a vendor exposes an API or connector, Cortava reads through it directly; where it doesn't, your vendor lands the data in your own data lake and Cortava reads it from there. Either way it stays inside your environment. The result: the systems you already run become the foundation your AI works from, no migration required.

Cortava Gateway
Unified intelligence layer
Federated  ·  Ontology  ·  Governed
queries push down  ·  only results return  ·  data never leaves your environment
Symitar / Fiserv / FISCore banking · Accounts · Members
Temenos / FinacleCore + digital banking
Alkami / Q2 / MahaloDigital banking · Sessions
MeridianLink / nCinoLoan origination · Decisions
Velera / CO-OPCard · ACH · Payments
Empower / GLOrigination · General ledger
Salesforce / HubSpotCRM · Engagement · Marketing
+ Any system with an APIBSA/AML, collections, ERP & more
Snowflake / DatabricksCloud data platforms, EDW, and native AWS/Azure/GCP stacks
Optimize what you run
Turn your core into the foundation for AI.
Cortava connects through your core's native APIs and turns the data already inside it into something every AI agent can act on. Whether you run Symitar, Fiserv DNA, FIS Horizon, or Temenos, every agent reads through governed, permissioned calls. No rip and replace. No migration. You keep the core you run, and finally put the value inside it to work.
Cross-system context
Fraud caught where it crosses systems
A fraud agent that only sees one system misses most of the picture. Cortava's fraud agent simultaneously correlates core account patterns (Symitar, Fiserv, or FIS), Velera card activity, and MeridianLink new-account signals in real time, in a single query, with data never leaving your environment.
Pushdown optimization
Fast queries at scale
Cortava uses pushdown optimization complex filtering and aggregation happen at the source database, not in memory. Queries that would take minutes in a traditional data pipeline run in seconds. Your member-facing agents stay responsive.
Governed & auditable
Every agent query is permissioned and logged
Cortava brokers each agent's access through role-based, permissioned queries and records every one. You get a complete, auditable decision trail across every connected system built for the kind of governance NCUA's examiners now expect, not a black box.
Federate using natural language
Ask in English. Cortava queries every system at once.
Your analysts and your agents ask in plain language. Cortava translates it into one governed, federated query across your core, lending, and payment systems, runs it in place, and returns only the result. No SQL to write, no data moved, every access logged.
Natural language query demo
"Show me members with checking accounts above $10,000 who haven't applied for a loan in the past 2 years but have had 3+ direct deposits per month"
Generated federated SQL across Symitar + Empower
SELECT m.member_id, m.full_name,
       a.balance, d.deposit_count
FROM symitar.members m
JOIN symitar.accounts a ON m.id = a.member_id
JOIN empower.deposit_summary d
     ON m.id = d.member_id
WHERE a.type = 'CHECKING'
  AND a.balance > 10000
  AND d.monthly_count >= 3
  AND m.id NOT IN (
    SELECT member_id FROM
    meridianlink.applications
    WHERE created_at > NOW() - INTERVAL '2 years'
  )
16+
Pre-built connectors
Symitar, Fiserv, FIS, Temenos, Finacle, MeridianLink, Alkami, Q2, Velera, Empower and more out of the box.
0
Data migrations required
Your data stays in its source system. Cortava activates it where it lives, no copy, no new warehouse.
8 Wks
To live on Symitar
Cortava intelligence live on your Symitar environment in 8 weeks. No custom integration project required.
100%
Data in your environment
Cloud-tenant, private cloud, or on-premises. Member data never leaves your infrastructure.
The ontology

Your whole credit union,
as one governed model.

Federation gives you the data; the ontology gives it meaning. Cortava models your whole credit union as a governed object graph: your members, accounts, loans, and cards become typed objects, the joins that matter become links across your cores, and the actions an agent may take are typed and governed too. It is mapped to the standards your examiners already trust, so it is the one model every agent reads from and acts on, not another proprietary black box.

Object types
Every record becomes a typed object
A member in Symitar becomes a Member. An account becomes an Account, a card a Card, an application a Loan. Datasets become object types and columns become typed, PII-marked properties, so an agent reads a whole Member with meaning attached, not a raw core row it has to decode.
Row becomes objectTyped propertiesPII-marked
Link types
The links that span your cores
Joins become links, and the ones that matter most cross systems: a Member owns an Account in the core, carries a Card at Velera, applied for a Loan in MeridianLink, and shows up in Alkami. That cross-system graph is the whole-member view no single core can give you.
ownsAccounthasCardCross-system
Action types
What an agent may do, typed and governed
Actions are modeled too. An agent can propose flagging a member for review or opening a case, but Cortava writes only to your systems of engagement, never the core or the lending system, and a human approves anything consequential. Every action is audited.
Propose, not executeHuman approvesAudited
Standards-aligned
Mapped to what your examiners trust
The model is not proprietary. Object types map to real FIBO classes, CUFX elements, and NCUA 5300 account codes, and it uses FIBO's party-in-role pattern, so one resolved member can be a borrower on one loan, a joint owner on an account, and a guarantor on another, without ever being duplicated.
FIBO / CUFX / 5300Party-in-roleNot proprietary
One member, as one governed object
Resolved in place across Symitar, Velera, MeridianLink, and Alkami into a single typed Member.
The typed object an agent receives · PII-masked · cited to source
Member {
  memberId        MBR-2481
  fullName        Jordan Ellis
  ssn             ██ masked ██
  creditBand      740-799
  segment         Prime · 8-yr member

  ownsAccount     →  4 Accounts     Symitar
  hasCard         →  2 Cards        Velera
  appliedForLoan  →  1 Loan         MeridianLink
  touchedChannel  →  Mobile, Branch Alkami

  action  Flag for review   ·  a human approves
}
1
governed model every agent reads and acts on
cross-system
links a single core cannot give you
0
member records copied out of your systems
Object types map to published FIBO, CUFX, and NCUA 5300 definitions, not proprietary ones.
Governance & trust

Agents that act. And explain.
Governed at every step.

Cortava is the governed gateway between your agents and your core systems and business applications: it governs what member data an agent can read and what it is allowed to do, not which model it calls. This is not an LLM gateway. A neuro-symbolic architecture enforces NCUA regulations, ECOA fair lending rules, and BSA/AML requirements as immutable policy, checked at every decision step, so every agent acting on the whole member stays inside your rules. The decision stays deterministic: rules and local models are the source of truth, the language model only parses, summarizes, and drafts, and a human approves anything consequential.

Symbolic layer rule & constraint enforcement
NCUA regulations encoded as enforced policy rules
ECOA fair lending rules, BSA/AML requirements, HMDA data standards, and NCUA examination expectations are encoded as enforced policy rules not as prompts that can be overridden. Every agent decision is validated against this layer before and after execution. Deterministic, auditable, defensible in examination.
NCUA complianceECOA / fair lendingBSA / AML rulesPolicy engine
Bidirectional constraint enforcement
Memory & grounding layer
4-tier persistent member context
Session memory (current interaction), Episodic memory (past decisions), Semantic memory (member facts), Procedural memory (policies and workflows). Every agent remembers what matters so your AI doesn't treat every interaction as if it's the first one.
Session contextMember historyPolicy memoryRAG pipeline
Neural outputs grounded by enforced policy rules
Neural layer LLM routing & orchestration
Multi-agent orchestration across your stack
Multi-agent orchestration with sequential, parallel, and gateway-governed patterns. Multi-provider LLM routing sends each task to the right model based on cost, latency, and task type. Config-driven via JSON, no engineering rework when requirements change.
Multi-agent orchestrationMulti-LLM routingConfig-driven
Every decision logged with full lineage
Governance layer audit & observability
Every decision traceable to the rule that governed it
Immutable audit trails for every AI decision. Column-level data lineage. Full decision tracing for quality scoring and model improvement. Human-in-the-loop approval queues for high-stakes decisions. Cortava doesn't just run your agents it makes every decision examinable.
Immutable audit trailColumn lineageHITL approvalDrift monitoring
The Cortava differentiator
"Every AI decision governed at every step, not just filtered at the output."
Most AI platforms add safety as a filter on the way out. Cortava enforces your regulatory constraints at every step of the agent's work: before it queries data, during execution, and before it acts. The result is AI your examiners can audit, not just AI your members can use.
Capability
Other platforms
Cortava
NCUA compliance
Configured per deployment
Encoded as enforced policy rules at every decision
Fair lending (ECOA)
Post-hoc monitoring or prompts
Constraint layer prevents non-compliant outputs structurally
Decision audit trail
Logs of inputs/outputs
Full decision graph: data source, rule, agent action
Cross-system context
Single-system or manual integration
Federated across entire credit union stack in real time
Data sovereignty
SaaS data leaves environment
Your cloud, your infrastructure, your rules
Bring your own agents

We make every agent work.

The agent market moves fast and gets cheaper every month. Locking into one vendor's agents is a bad bet. So bring the agents you want. Build your own, or choose best-of-breed agents from the wider ecosystem. Cortava gives any of them the same thing: governed, real-time access to member data across your whole stack, with every decision logged. Whether you are rolling out agents for lending or piloting them for member service, they all read the same governed member data through Cortava.

Every vendor's agent sees its own system. Your members live across all of them. So does Cortava.

We build three agents, starting with discovery, on one governed member layer. Every other category, we orchestrate.
First-party · Discovery · Start here
Core Discovery Agent
Years of custom PowerOn logic pile up inside your Symitar core, and the people who wrote it move on. The Discovery Agent reads your specfiles, batch jobs, and integrations, recovers the business rules in plain language with a source citation for each, maps the dependencies, and flags what needs a human owner. It makes your core legible before anything else runs on it, and it documents the logic in a way that helps your team and your core provider alike. Read-only, in your environment.
Symitar PowerOn · batch jobs · integrations · dependencies
First-party · Fraud
Cross-System Fraud Detection
Fraud shows itself across the core, card activity, and new-account signals at the same time. Cortava correlates all of them in one governed query, in real time, and flags synthetic identity, ACH, and new-account fraud before the losses land. No single-system agent can see this picture.
Core + cards + lending + new-account signals
Foundation · The member layer
Member Intelligence
One governed view of the whole member, assembled across every system in real time: holdings, channels, and the relationship, plus the next-best action and the evidence behind it, each with a citation and an audit record. This is not an agent. It is the member layer every agent reads from, so each one acts on the full relationship instead of a single slice.
Core + lending + payments + digital banking + external signals
First-party · Governance
Governance & Audit
The agent that watches the agents. What each one accessed, what it decided, and the evidence behind every answer. Logged, immutable, and ready for an examiner. Governance is the product, so we build it ourselves.
Every agent · every query · every decision
Orchestrated · Bring your own or best-of-breed
Category banking agents
Member service and conversational engagement across text, chat, voice, and video. Lending and underwriting. Collections. Marketing and member growth. Compliance and regulatory reporting. Finance and ALCO. Run your own or plug in best-of-breed agents for each. Cortava orchestrates them all on one governed layer, with the same cross-system data access and audit trail as our own.
Member service · Lending · Collections · Marketing · Compliance · Finance
Why we don't build the commodity agents.
Lending, marketing, and collections already have strong, specialized agents, and more arrive every month. Locking you into ours would be the wrong bet. Cortava's job is to let the best of them plug in and run governed across your stack, not to compete with them. You bring the agents. We orchestrate them and give them safe, governed access to the data.
Every agent runs on the same layer: always on, included in every deployment.
Whether an agent is ours, yours, or a best-of-breed third party's, it works through the same governed layer. You don't re-solve data access for the next agent you add. Governance and lineage are part of the platform: NCUA, ECOA, and BSA/AML rules enforced at every data access and decision point, with full lineage and an immutable audit trail.
Federation gateway
Queries your stack in place, no data movement
Ontology
One typed model of the member across every system
Agent gateway
Governed, typed, cited access for every agent
Governance & lineage
Policy enforced before every action, audit-ready by design
Agents are pluggable. Because Cortava federates the systems it connects to, it can also orchestrate the agents those systems expose, so agents from different vendors can work the same request together: a digital banking agent can draw on the cross-system intelligence running on Cortava, and another agent can call back for the data a given system owns. Whoever builds them, they run on the same governed layer, so every piece of member data they touch stays permissioned and logged by Cortava.
Deployment models

Your environment. Your rules.
Your deployment choice.

Cortava is not a SaaS-only product. Credit unions have strict requirements around data residency, NCUA third-party oversight, and board-level data governance. Every model delivers the full Cortava core platform: you select the agents you want deployed in whichever environment fits your institution.

Private Cloud Install
Your AWS, Azure, or GCP account
Cortava installs into your own AWS, Azure, or GCP account. Your data, your encryption keys, your access controls. Full compliance posture ownership.
On-Premises Install
Your own data center
Deploys on Kubernetes in your own data center. Zero data egress. Air-gap capable. For institutions with board-mandated data residency requirements.
CUSO Shared Service
Coming soon
Cortava delivered as a shared service through your existing CUSO relationship, leveraging trust relationships you already have. CUSO partnerships are in development.
Data sovereignty promise
Your members' data never leaves your environment.
NCUA third-party oversight requirements and your board's data governance policy demand it. Cortava was designed from day one for credit union data sovereignty, not retrofitted to comply with it.
Your data is never used to train shared or third-party models. Agents surface evidence for your team to act on. They don't make autonomous lending or adverse-action decisions, and every output traces back to its source records, so a denial is always defensible to both a member and an examiner.
  • Member PII never leaves your environment in any deployment model
  • All data processed within your cloud account or data center
  • Encryption keys remain under your control
  • Full audit log of every data access by every agent
  • NCUA third-party oversight documentation provided
  • Board-level data governance reporting built in
Get started

The agents will keep coming.
Make sure they run on your terms.

One governed layer for every agent, across your whole stack, in your environment. In one working session we connect Cortava to your systems and show agents acting on the whole member under your rules. No slide decks, just your stack, live.

Request Early Access
© 2026 Cortava, Inc. All rights reserved.
SOC 2 · in progress