This year, MeridianLink® LIVE! welcomed approximately 1,400 attendees for a week filled with big ideas, accelerated innovation, and powerful moments of connection across our bank and credit union community.
One of the most meaningful moments each year is getting to celebrate our customers who are using MeridianLink solutions to solve complex challenges, move faster, and have a positive impact on the people and communities they serve.
The fourth annual Arc Award winners were selected from a highly competitive pool of nominees, honoring financial institution who embody our Lending Made Human focus with innovative use cases and a deep commitment to consumer impact.
The recipients of the 2026 MeridianLink Arc Awards are:
- Associated Credit Union
- Bangor Savings Bank (two-time winner)
- Chevron Federal Credit Union
- Educational Federal Credit Union
- iQ Credit Union
- Mirastar Federal Credit Union
- Natco Credit Union
- Newfi Lending
- Publix Employees Federal Credit Union
- Salal Credit Union
- Sun Community Federal Credit Union
Associated Credit Union
Associated Credit Union modernized its digital onboarding and consumer lending experience to deliver faster decisions, lower friction, and stronger security for members. By leveraging MeridianLink® Access and Consumer, along with MeridianLink® Consulting Reveal Pro services and integrations with Socure, Plaid, DealerTrack, and RouteOne, the credit union streamlined identity verification, automated decisioning, and accelerated funding across lending channels—while maintaining strong risk and fraud controls.
This transformation delivered measurable, member-first results:
- 40% reduction in approved-to-fund time
- 53% instant approval rate across all consumer lending products, including 62% for indirect auto loans and 50% for credit cards
Bangor Savings Bank
Bangor Savings Bank is being honored as an Arc Award winner for the second year in a row! They turned to MeridianLink, with support from TruStage and Socure, to automate their end-to-end lending process, eliminating manual data entry, strengthening workflow reliability, and improving borrower service. Now, on top of faster turnaround times and greater customer confidence, the bank has:
- Auto-mapped 100% of personal and vehicle loan data to TruStage and core systems
- Saved roughly 300 hours annually with automated HELOC closing
- Reduced identity verification delays that once impacted 100% of applicants to fewer than 5%, in turn reducing abandonment by 20%
Chevron Federal Credit Union
Supported by MeridianLink® Consumer, MeridianLink® Insight, and Reveal Pro, Chevron Federal Credit Union infused data-driven automation into their consumer lending operations to optimize decisioning, improve visibility, and help members move through applications with speed and transparency. This initiative delivered:
- A 67% true decision automation rate, exceeding the 60% goal
- $197M in funded direct consumer loans with strong risk outcomes
- Portfolio outperformance with a combined delinquency and charge-off rate of 0.59% and accurate automated decisions
- A record 91% member satisfaction rate
Educational Federal Credit Union
Educational Federal Credit Union harnessed MeridianLink® Consumer’s intelligent workflow automation and decisioning capabilities to transform their digital lending strategy and drive growth without operational burden, which:
- More than tripled instant decision rates (from roughly 10% to 36%)
- Reduced the average approval time to just over 50 hours, down from approximately 125 hours
- Boosted application volume by 45%
- Placed the application-to-fund rate at 34%, above the 31% peer average
- Led to 6% loan growth, outperforming the 5% peer average
iQ Credit Union
iQ Credit Union leveraged MeridianLink® Opening and Consumer, along with Zest AI decisioning, to replace manual reviews and rigid scorecard thresholds with real-time, AI-driven decisions and automated core booking. This dramatically improved member and staff experiences in terms of speed and ease-of-use, leading to:
- An increase in instant decisions for multiple loan products: 75% for personal loans, 71% for credit cards, and 40% for direct auto
- Personal loan approvals in nearly half the time, from over 60 hours to under 31 hours
- Over 1,500 annual staff hours recovered
- A nearly 50% booking rate, up from 35%
Mirastar Credit Union
With MeridianLink Consumer and MeridianLink Opening, Mirastar Credit Union created a seamless, omnichannel application journey designed to put member experience first—delivering faster approvals and greater consistency at scale. That transformation resulted in stronger engagement, enhanced efficiency, and a member-first digital strategy poised for growth, as well as:
- An 87% increase in deposit applications
- 116% more booked deposits with a 91% look-to-book rate
- A 177% YoY increase in loan application volume
- A nearly 30% instant approval average
Natco Credit Union
By migrating to MeridianLink’s Modern Experience solutions Natco Credit Union standardized permissions, improved application validation, and revamped auto-decisioning informed by 5 years of performance data. This significantly decreased manual work while enhancing speed, accuracy, and member transparency within their lending operation, paving the way for:
- Surging automated decisioning rates for auto loans (from 14% to 42%), personal loans (from 3% to 32%), and credit cards (from 7% to 45%)
- 54% fewer staff errors
- A 12-hour average funding time, nearly 70% faster than peers
- $5M in incremental funded loan volume from automated cross-qualifications
- 90% of approved loans moving forward to funding
Newfi Lending
Using MeridianLink® Mortgage’s flexible APIs and configurable workflow automations, Newfi launched InstantLE for real-time, self-service disclosures and IncomeIQ for automated bank statement ingestion and analysis. On top achieving same-day turnaround times for processes that once took days to complete, the mortgage lender also:
- Fully automated 70% of disclosures
- Increased bank statements analysis volume by 115% without straining staff
- Saved $330K-$520K annually
- Eliminated SLA variability, improved borrower and broker satisfaction, and created a scalable, highly automated operating model that generates measurable ROI
Publix Employees Federal Credit Union
Publix Employees Federal Credit Union partnered with MeridianLink to streamline the full lending lifecycle for better member experiences. By bringing automation, self-service, and data-driven decisioning to their loan and account origination processes, they reduced manual tasks, enhanced transparency, and empowered staff to easily scale for growth while prioritizing member relationships, in addition to:
- Increasing consumer loan production by 70%, membership by over 4%, and share balances by more than 10%
- Tripling auto loan originations
- Shaving 60% off the average decision time and 79% off the average loan processing time
- Moving loans through the end-to-end cycle 71% faster
Salal Credit Union
Salal Credit Union turned to MeridianLink® Access, supported by MeridianLink Consulting’s Process Assessment and Socure identity verification, to reimagine lengthy, rigid digital account opening and application experiences into streamlined, intuitive journeys. This shift led to notable application volume growth, improved data quality, and greater efficiency, alongside:
- A nearly 50% faster average application time
- A 38% quicker average application-to-booking time
- A 27-point increase in new-member NPS
Sun Community Federal Credit Union
With support from MeridianLink Consumer, Sun Community Federal Credit Union extended instant decisioning across both digital and staff-assisted channels, ensuring accurate, real-time decisions wherever and whenever members applied. Empowered to deliver a faster yes to more qualified members, the credit union:
- Achieved a 52% instant decision rate, nearly doubling YoY
- Instantly approved 45% of applications, with 8,000+ of those applications decided in real time
- Elevated loan funding to 82% ($126M)
- Increased new member acquisition by 108%
See what faster, more intelligent lending and account opening could look like for your institution.
