CU Wallet CEO is all about the numbers

Paul Fiore, CEO and founder of the credit union centric mobile wallet CU Wallet, got his start in the industry working at an AT&T credit union in New York. While there, Fiore noticed that while there were several other credit unions around, even right down the block, they rarely competed with one another for the same accounts. This is where Fiore sees success of CU Wallet coming from: cooperation.

While a credit union on its own generally doesn’t have a huge number of members, credit unions as a whole make up a very significant percentage of the market. Fiore hopes to leverage the cooperative nature of credit unions to greatly expand CU Wallet’s potential consumer base and gain the attention of merchants while still allowing credit unions to keep their own brand image. When discussing this in an interview, Fiore states, “I think as an industry, credit unions coming together can aggregate their entire consumer base… that enables the credit unions to keep their brand and provide value to the consumer, but then also be attractive to merchants.”

Having announced Paydiant as CU wallet’s white label platform provider, Fiore is moving forward with confidence. When discussing consumer adoption Fiore says, “You either have to have the merchants or you have to have the consumers.” It seems pretty obvious at this point which path Fiore has chosen. CU wallet’s clients already represent over 2.6 million consumers and $38 billion dollars in assets, and this number, according to Fiore, is growing every day. With a goal of 10 million consumers by the first quarter of 2014, it seems Fiore hopes to make CU wallet, and its consumers, very difficult to ignore.