By Ray Birch
DOVER, Del.—For years, credit unions have watched deposits quietly leak to Robinhood, Schwab, Fidelity and other digital-first platforms as members opened investing accounts outside the cooperative.
That outflow is becoming harder to ignore—and increasingly, some in the industry argue digital investing may be the next major total-addressable-market opportunity for credit unions, not because they want to become brokerages, but because members increasingly expect banking, borrowing and investing to live in one place.
That is the core argument being made by InvestiFi CEO Kian Sarreshteh, who says the real threat isn’t simply losing an investing relationship—it’s losing the “one-stop shop” battle to fintechs, like Robinhood, that are bundling more of the consumer financial life into a single app. He said it’s become a war to hold on to a PFI relationship.
Sarreshteh defines “digital investing” as three core categories: self-directed stock and ETF trading (including fractional shares), robo-advisory portfolios built around a member’s risk tolerance, and crypto investing. In an interview, he said those capabilities increasingly matter because younger consumers are gravitating toward app-based investing rather than starting with a human advisor.
“The risk right now for credit unions not adopting digital investing is that Americans are really buying this one-stop shop where I can go to a single experience, a single app and have banking products, borrowing and lending products, investing products…all in this single experience,” Sarreshteh said.
He pointed to Robinhood as the clearest example: the company reported a record $68 billion in net deposits in 2025 and $1.51 billion in net interest revenues alone, underscoring how powerful the bundled model has become. He also cited SoFi as another example of a lender-turned-broader-financial-platform, as the company continues to expand “Money,” “Invest” and crypto offerings; SoFi said financial services products were a major driver of its growth in 2025.
Not Just Product Breadth
What makes the story more compelling for credit unions is that this isn’t just about product breadth—it’s about member retention and relevance, especially with younger consumers. J.D. Power’s 2025 U.S. Credit Union Satisfaction Study found satisfaction among members under age 40 declined four points year over year and sits 16 points below members 40 and older, with digital interactions specifically cited as a challenge.
Sarreshteh argued digital investing can be one of the stickier ways to close that gap.
“If credit unions do that, those deposit outflows do go down,” he said, adding that members given the option to invest through their credit union often prioritize the familiar institution over a third-party app. “What credit unions have that these third-party apps don’t is the trust factor…the relationships, the community presence, the physical branches.”
He contends that if a credit union combines that trust with modern investing tools, it can compete more effectively for the next generation of members instead of ceding those relationships to outside fintechs.
Delivery Matters
Kian Sarreshteh
Sarreshteh was emphatic that the delivery matters as much as the capability.
If digital investing is buried in a menu or treated like an afterthought, he said, members may not even realize it exists. The smarter approach, he argued, is native integration inside online and mobile banking, where investing balances appear alongside checking and savings on the main dashboard—essentially making investing feel like part of the core relationship, not an add-on.
Sarreshteh gave credit to major digital banking providers such as Q2, Alkami, Banno, Candescent, BankJoy and others for becoming more forward-looking about how those experiences should be embedded.
“The right way to do that is integrate it into your online banking and mobile apps…and it needs to be done in a very obvious way,” he said.
InvestiFi’s role in that ecosystem, he noted, is to help credit unions offer digital investing natively within their own digital banking channels rather than forcing members into a separate experience.
Sarreshteh emphasized that CUs must closely watch where the market appears to be heading: digital investing is increasingly being viewed not as wealth management’s little cousin, but as a retention, acquisition and deposit-defense strategy for credit unions trying to stay central in members’ financial lives.