How Eltropy helps credit unions and community banks better serve their communities with Twilio

Challenge

Eltropy wanted to give credit unions and community banks a state-of-the art, sophisticated voice experience, personalized for the communities they serve, with simpler deployment, less engineering effort, and a cost structure that fits their resources.

Solution

By building its AI voice stack on Twilio Conversation Relay and Programmable Voice, Eltropy automates routine member calls and escalates complex ones to human agents. Now, more calls can be resolved and every conversation is natural, multilingual, and compliant.

A credit union and community bank is more than a place to keep money. It acts as a pillar of trust in the community it serves. These institutions are built around a simple mission: financial access for all. Yet they compete for the same members as national banks, without the same deep pockets, engineering teams, or research budgets.

Communication is one area where costs rise fast. While many tech-savvy bank members are comfortable with mobile apps and web chats, over 65% of member communication still happens by phone. Answering every call isn’t cheap, but Eltropy helps budget-conscious community banks and credit unions punch above their weight. Its Agentic AI platform serves more than 750 Credit Unions and Community Banks across North America, bringing AI, text, voice, video, and chat together to run the front office—from lending and collections to the contact center.

To better deliver on its promise, Eltropy needed a cost-effective way to automate routine calls without losing the human touch that defines community banking.

To cash that check, Eltropy built its AI voice stack on Twilio Conversation Relay and Programmable Voice. Twilio’s trusted platform lets the company deliver reliable, tier-one banking communications that members expect without a national bank's budget.

Banking on a better AI voice experience

Credit unions and community banks are pillars of their local economies, but they run on limited resources. To keep pace with the experience members now expect, they have to scale service without scaling staff, and without the overhead of building massive engineering resources. Most customer interactions still happen by voice. For many members, especially those who are not digital natives, a call is still the most accessible way to communicate. 

"Most credit union customers prefer voice as a channel of communication,” says Arun Rao, CTO at Eltropy. “Other channels are picking up, but voice still happens to be the number one.” But every call answered by a person is a cost, and the volume never stops.

Older automation only made things worse. Traditional interactive voice response (IVR) systems were rigid and intent-based, forcing members to guess the exact keywords and dropping the call when a request got complicated. In a relationship-driven business, members withdraw the moment something sounds like a machine. Saahil Kamath, VP of product at Eltropy, says it bluntly: “People really do not like IVRs. A lot of these credit unions use banking by phone, so how do we remove that? How can AI help?” 

Then there was the vendor problem. Eltropy recognized that stitching together a fragmented stack of AI products was unsustainable, especially for the low-latency demands of live voice. The plan was to consolidate on one trusted partner that could handle the hard infrastructure, real-time streaming complexities, and compliance demands—but they had to move fast. Credit unions typically commit to a vendor for four to five years, so being first to market was a must.

Investing in a partner, not just a product

Eltropy had already built its contact center solution on Twilio Programmable Voice, so when it set out to add AI voice, the team already knew they had a partner they could count on. “When I make a decision to buy a product, the number one thing is I want them to be a partner, not a vendor,” Rao says.

That thinking led the CTO straight to Conversation Relay with Twilio. Instead of stitching together its own transcription, text-to-speech, and streaming across vendors, Eltropy could build on infrastructure Twilio already ran at scale. 

Conversation Relay delivered multiple natural voices and the ability to tune tonality and emotion, so each credit union’s bot could sound human. To stay compliant, guardrails were layered in at every level. Each bot draws only from its institution's own knowledge base and cites the source behind every answer, so it never invents information.

This all has to happen without any downtime, and real-time voice is especially prone to sudden spikes, whether from a holiday rush, a natural disaster, or an ATM outage. Handling those swings in-house would have meant a constant infrastructure battle. Building on Conversation Relay gave Eltropy a scalable system so its engineers could focus on member use cases instead of managing infrastructure.

"Real-time communications are notorious for spike loads," says Rahul Prakash, Senior Director of Engineering at Eltropy. "We found Twilio to be a reliable partner to help us with scale and consistent latencies."

Venkatesh Prasad, Senior Engineering Manager at Eltropy, says that reliability came with room to grow. "When we decided to go with Conversation Relay, I told Rahul we can handle 60% more calls. That eases our infrastructure maintenance, and we have been able to scale up really well."

The platform also had to speak the member’s language, literally. In California, about 40% of credit union members are Spanish-speaking, and Conversation Relay made instant multilingual support possible. “Showing the demo and telling them to speak to it in Spanish blew people’s minds,” says Kamath.

Personalized service at a fraction of the cost

Eltropy’s voice agents now resolve 70% to 80% of inbound member calls on their own. Simple requests like balances, recent transactions, and payment skips are handled instantly, giving resource-strapped institutions the around-the-clock coverage they could never staff for.

Even the calls that reach a human are shorter because members are authenticated before they connect. Eltropy shaves two to three minutes off the average call, and staff who once spent their days on repetitive questions can focus on conversations that need a person. “Our thesis is to automate the simple and mundane and augment the complex, freeing up time so agents can have valuable, empathetic conversations with members," says Prakash.

One credit union brought its contact center from 47 agents to about 10 while holding a 94% containment rate. Staff shifted from answering the same questions all day to building the member relationships that set community banking apart.

By making automated service sound human, Eltropy has watched member trust grow. Some members now call more often, and credit unions give their AI agents names, faces, and personalities. This all points back to the same goal of giving every member an empathetic and personalized experience at a fraction of the cost, just by picking up the phone.

Financial access anytime, anywhere

By building its AI voice platform on Twilio, Eltropy gives CFIs the same tier-one experience a national bank would offer, bringing its vision of financial access anytime, anywhere to life.

That vision is expanding. Eltropy plans to use agentic AI so members can do more than ask questions, such as reversing a fee or finishing a request. “We're moving from conversations to task completion,” says Kamath. “That's our big push." 

With Twilio’s partnership, Eltropy is giving community banks and credit unions the tools to compete, while giving their members—whatever their age, language, or ability—a financial partner that answers the call.