Pentagon Federal Credit Union gains a competitive edge with Agentforce.

Manual processes left little time for high-impact relationship building.

PenFed knows what it means to serve those who serve. Founded in 1935 for defense and military communities, they’ve grown into a financial powerhouse with 2.8 million members nationwide. As they shifted from a military-only focus to an open charter, membership grew quickly — and so did the need for technology that could scale with them. Their mission, however, remains the same: to help members achieve their financial dreams by delivering better value than any competitor through higher deposit rates, lower loan rates, and service that earns lifelong trust.

As PenFed looks to their next chapter, staying competitive means evolving with member expectations. Big banks, large credit unions, and fast-moving fintechs are all competing for the same digital-first consumers. Many potential members don’t naturally think of credit unions as their primary financial home, so PenFed wants to change that perception with intuitive digital channels that make every interaction easy. 

Their goal is to become a truly member-first, digitally native institution — making everyday banking just as simple for military families stationed worldwide as it is stateside, while also encouraging deeper engagement across the member base. Today, many members start with a single product, like an auto loan, but don’t always explore additional offerings, leaving room for stronger conversion, cross-sell, and long-term growth.

“Every day, I have to wake up hungry and running in order to compete,” said James Schenck, CEO of PenFed. “Our members can walk out the door any day to get another car loan or deposit their money somewhere else.”

To reach that next level, PenFed wants to streamline the routine work that slows teams down and prevents fast, consistent service. Member service reps (MSRs) handle roughly 10,000 calls a day, and each one requires about four minutes of manual summarization. Meanwhile, the IT service desk supporting 2,300 employees fields constant password reset and laptop provisioning requests. And in collections, teams often need to piece together payment histories before they can have meaningful, empathetic conversations. Together, these tasks consume time that could instead be spent strengthening relationships.

PenFed already has the people and expertise to deliver standout service. Now they want technology to automate repetitive work so employees can focus on what matters most: listening, advising, and connecting with members in new ways.

Running nearly every part of the business on Salesforce helps PenFed move fast to stay competitive.

The first step to creating member-first, digitally native experiences was consolidating the more than 600 disconnected tools they’d been using onto Agentforce 360, Salesforce’s full product portfolio.

“Salesforce is in my branches, call centers, internal operations, mobile app, and web experiences,” said Schenck. “It all runs on Salesforce. Why? It allows me to move faster.”

Both halves of PenFed’s Salesforce architecture are built on Agentforce Financial Services:

• Member 360, which manages all member-facing work for 3 million people. This includes lead management, onboarding, servicing, and relationship management.
• Employee 360, PenFed’s employee portal which hosts it’s Intranet, Policies and Procedures and custom ITSM solution.

PenFed’s boldest step was building their digital banking platform with Agentforce Self-Service. This enabled them to migrate more than 2 million members off legacy apps and today, all 2.8 million members use Agentforce Self-Service as their primary banking interface.

With the mobile app, web experience, Self-Service, and Member 360 all on one unified platform, staff across every line of business see the most up-to-date data, follow the same business rules, and operate under industry-leading security controls. No conflicting systems. No batch syncs. No delays.

Consistent data, shared business logic, and a centralized set of controls enable PenFed to adapt quickly, deliver consistent service, and maintain their edge in a competitive industry.

Agentforce autonomously resolves 75% of routine IT requests and helps collection reps work 55% more efficiently.

After consolidating their tech stack, PenFed turned to Agentforce, AI agents powered by the Agentforce 360 Platform, to eliminate routine work that slowed teams down. Despite being in a regulated industry, PenFed was able to move fast – from an internal proof of concept to fully deployed agentic automation in just seven months. 

These high-impact Agentforce use cases remove friction across the organization, freeing staff to focus on member relationships and setting the stage for scaling agentic AI more broadly:

• Penny — IT service management (ITSM) agent: Launched in April 2025 on Employee 360, Penny supports 2,300 employees and autonomously resolves 75% of routine IT service requests. For example, when an employee requests a password reset or asks when they’re eligible for a new laptop, Penny handles the request end to end. This gives IT staff more time to assist with complex cases.
• Max — collections research agent: Max helps collections reps prepare for member meetings by pulling payment histories and validating contact information from Member 360. With this context ahead of time, collections reps are more efficient and have more time for empathetic, productive conversations with members sent to collections and potentially facing financial hardship.
• Wingman – employee service agent: Wingman supports over 500 Member Service Representatives and Financial Center teammates in routine tasks such as summarizing member profiles, drafting emails and providing concise knowledge article summaries and step by step instructions. This agent has led to a 10% decrease in handle time for support agents and reduce back office support calls by 30%.

Behind the scenes, Agentforce makes more than 700,000 LLM calls each month to power agentic reasoning and actions, summarize calls, assemble member histories and classify cases so staff can work faster and smarter.

“We save 30,000 minutes a day of labor with automated call summaries alone, which adds up to $3 million worth of time a year,” said Schenck.

Unified data from Salesforce and external systems with zero copy to Data 360 create the foundation for trusted, accurate AI.

Secure access to PenFed’s member data is made possible by MuleSoft and Data 360, which work together to ensure Agentforce can access the right information in the right format at the right time. MuleSoft acts as the integration layer, connecting Hogan, TrueCar, and other third-party systems to Salesforce and delivering real-time data under strict security controls. 

Data 360 then serves as the harmonization layer by unifying those MuleSoft-integrated feeds with PenFed's Agentforce 360 apps to create complete member profiles. Transaction history from Snowflake is accessed through Data 360 using zero copy, while other sources — including account balances in Hogan, credit scores from Experian, and marketing leads from Adobe — are unified into a consistent, governed view of each member.

Because Data 360 supports retrieval-augmented generation, Agentforce can search across this mix of structured and unstructured data to surface the most relevant details in real time. This allows agents to reason over up-to-date member context without moving or duplicating data, keeping profiles accurate, secure, and automatically synchronized across systems.

Running everything on the deeply unified Headless 360 platform saved PenFed valuable time. They were able to convert their existing Salesforce development work — like screen flows, business processes, and Apex code — into agent-triggered autolaunch flows. The business logic already existed. All they had to do was build agents to run it automatically.

PenFed’s next chapter focuses on smarter service, deeper personalization, and fully conversational banking.

“I want to serve 6 million members as easily as we’re currently serving 3 million members with this core team of employees,” said Schenck.

Agentforce is at the center of PenFed’s next stage of transformation. AI agents grounded in deep industry data and contextualized for banking will surface product details, rate calculations, and eligibility criteria in real time to help reps spend less time looking for info and more time connecting with members.

PenFed is also using Agentforce to develop new member-facing AI agents to handle tasks like money movement, compliant product and rate information, loan application status, and wealth management referrals. Long-term, they intend to replace their traditional bank-by-phone menus with Agentforce Voice, making on-demand, fully conversational banking possible with AI agents that understand natural language. 

PenFed is preparing to launch their first member loyalty program on Salesforce as well. Paired with the migration from Adobe to Agentforce Marketing, the program will support personalized, multichannel engagement driven by unified profiles in Member 360. This will help them identify cross- and upsell opportunities and deliver personalized outreach that helps each member discover products that’ll help them gain the most value from their banking.

Schenck credits the Agentforce 360 Platform for continuing to drive PenFed’s agility. “If I had to describe why Salesforce helps us move fast, I’d say it boils down to three things: low-code development, strong security, and a connected architecture,” said Schenck.

1. Low-code development tools: Agentforce Builder lets internal teams build and update agents themselves instead of relying on offshore consultants. This makes it easier to implement changes quickly and allows nontechnical staff to create, refine, test, and launch new Agentforce capabilities on their own.
2. Strong security: As a regulated credit union, PenFed needed ironclad governance around every AI interaction. The Agentforce Trust Layer applies the same data-sharing rules, privacy controls, and access policies that already govern human users. Because this security is built into the platform, PenFed didn’t have to bolt on extra systems or negotiate custom exceptions — Agentforce delivered the compliance model they needed from day 1.
3. Connected architecture: Since everything is linked, changes flow across systems automatically, reducing coordination and speeding delivery. This makes it faster and easier to launch workflows that accelerate work, simplify tasks, and provide service that sets them apart from their competitors.

These advantages support PenFed’s broader vision for becoming a member-first, digitally native financial institution competing on experience and innovation. “Agentforce allows us to scale and grow on this same platform, pay our employees more, and give them better benefits. Most importantly, it helps us take perfect care of our members and that’s what fuels our growth,” said Schenck.

And the partnership goes beyond technology. Schenck also serves as CEO of the PenFed Foundation, which supports veterans and military families. Salesforce sponsors the foundation twice yearly and connects PenFed with programs like Hiring Our Heroes — reinforcing a shared commitment to service.

With Salesforce, PenFed is unlocking growth, empowering employees, and delivering exceptional experiences at scale. By combining technology with a culture focused on members and service, the credit union is bridging the gap between big-bank scale and fintech agility, ensuring their members receive superior value without compromise.