Case Study: America First Credit Union achieves real-time ML observability and ships AI with confidence with Arize AI

America First Credit Union Pioneers A New Era of AI-Led Growth

America First Credit Union, a member-owned financial institution with over $17 billion in assets and 1.2 million members, faced scaling challenges as its ML efforts grew beyond what BI tools could monitor — including 24–48 hour delays in detecting drift, high IT costs, and the opportunity cost of engineers spending time on monitoring instead of building models. To address this, the credit union selected Arize AI’s ML observability platform to provide real‑time monitoring, automated alerts, and model performance tracing.

Arize AI integrated via its Python SDK and features like automated monitors, cohort-level drift and bias tracing, and data quality checks into America First Credit Union’s CI/CD pipeline, enabling immediate root-cause analysis and faster remediation. The deployment delivered measurable impact: payback in under two months, an estimated >500% ROI in year one, ~2–3 FTEs saved, hundreds of team hours recovered annually, model drift now caught immediately instead of 1–2 days, and the team increasing production deployments to about two new models per month.

America First Credit Union

Richard Woolston

Data Science Manager