It isn’t every day that the Vatican weighs in on tech stack ethics, but Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, managed to strike a chord that resonates far beyond the walls of Saint Peter’s. In his address, the Pope called for humanity to “disarm” artificial intelligence.
Before you lose your mind, he wasn’t advocating for a return to the dark ages or suggesting we smash all our server farms. Instead, he warned against an “armed logic of competition” driven by pure commercial dominance – a world where a technocratic elite holds all the keys, ultimately widening the gap between the technologically included and the excluded.
This seems to be a discussion that has credit union written all over it.
We often talk about the fintech “arms race” in purely existential terms: If we don’t adopt the latest shiny thing, we risk obsolescence. But the Pope’s perspective forces a deeper question: Who are we arming ourselves against, and at what cost to our core mission?
Right now, the AI landscape is heavily consolidated. A handful of massive tech giants control the primary infrastructure, while the nation’s largest megabanks spend billions to monopolize automated efficiencies. If credit unions simply buy into closed, black-box AI models off the shelf, we aren’t leveling the playing field; we’re climbing the fence and sneaking onto somebody else’s field. (It is baseball season, after all.)
True “disarmament” in fintech means rejecting the hyper-aggressive, growth-at-all-costs mindset of big tech. It means demanding open-source, democratized AI tools that smaller institutions can actually access, understand, and control.
More importantly, it requires us to double down on what the encyclical calls the spaces where machines cannot mature: relationships, empathy, and responsibility – areas where credit unions already lead.
When a megabank deploys AI, the goal is often total automation – eliminating human friction to maximize transaction volume. When a credit union deploys AI, the goal should be the exact opposite. We should use automation to absorb back-office friction precisely so our people have more time to engage in the human-centric, relationship-backed financial guidance that defines our movement.
As we navigate the next wave of technological disruption, let’s ensure we use AI as a force multiplier to empower local communities, rather than an algorithmic weapon that alienates them.