Fintech incubators are all the rage in financial services today, and a Massachusetts credit union is one of the latest to join the ranks.

Marlborough-based Digital Federal Credit Union (DCU) is perhaps the latest Massachusetts financial institution to launch its own version of a tech incubator: the DCU Center of Excellence in Financial Services (DCU CoE).

The center is a collaborative effort between DCU and the Boston-based co-working company Workbar, and DCU recently announced its second round of fintech startups invited to the center. The companies chosen cover a breadth of financial services, from investment to real estate to financial literacy to prepaid cards.

Elsen, an investment platform that was among the four selected for CoE’s inaugural year, ultimately wound up raising $400,000 in investment money and moving into its own office, just a short distance from the center where it spent six months working and brainstorming.

“It’s been very rewarding for us, but also for those entrepreneurs who may have not had the opportunity to work with a financial services company,” said David Araujo, DCU’s vice president of information systems.

DCU selected seven fintech startups from among 15 that applied for the same opportunity this year. Those seven startups will get free access to work in the center, located at 695 Atlantic Ave. They’ll get Internet access, coffee and conference rooms, but beyond that, they’ll also have the opportunity to network with peer startups and to pick the brains of DCU’s leadership team.

He said the credit union has roped Fidelity, State Street and Eastern Bank into the effort as well, with the idea that it may be able to help forge mutually beneficial relationships between these fetal fintech companies and major financial institutions.

“Through relationships, we can then bring these folks to those companies so they can have a better shot at getting into the doors of those organizations,” Araujo said.

And what’s in it for the credit union?

“We’re learning through the process. It’s really about giving back to the community and the financial services industry as a whole and giving entrepreneurs opportunities,” he said. “This will help us learn what’s going on in the financial services industry. It’s a resource opportunity for us.”

Paths To Deployment 

With the Center of Excellence, DCU joins a growing number of other financial institutions rolling out tech incubators as traditional financial institutions scramble for survival in an increasingly digital, increasingly mobile age. Count among them Capital One, Citi, Chase and Visa. Fidelity Labs is also based in Boston and so is State Street’s GX Investment Labs. And on the community banking scene, Eastern Bank made a splash last year when it launched its own tech incubator, Eastern Labs.

But as more financial institutions roll out their own labs or incubators, it may be worth also questioning whether the effort contains a clear path to deployment or assessment of those cool new technologies – or if it’s just a shiny new toy.

“I’m loathe to name names, but some of the large ones feel more to me like they’re simply investment vehicles as opposed to mechanisms for assessment or deployment,” said Ron Shevlin, a director of research at Cornerstone Advisors. “Some of them, it seems like they’ve got a lot of money to spend so let’s go find great investments. Why not jump on that bandwagon?”

Shevlin also said that from a conceptual perspective, the incubator idea is not exactly a new one. He drew parallels between that and the Internet-only bank subsidiaries launched by financial institutions in the late ’90s during the dot-com boom – for instance, the now-defunct WingspanBank, launched by Bank One Corp., which has since merged into JP Morgan Chase & Co.

While he was less familiar with DCU’s initiative, Shevlin did praise Eastern Labs for its clear path to deployment.

Eastern Labs was tasked, among other things, with analyzing data the bank already has on its customers to figure out how it might better tweak its products and services, said Dan O’Malley, the chief digital officer of Eastern Bank and head of Eastern Labs.

“My perspective is that banks need to innovate or diet, meaning they need to either be investing in innovation or slimming down and preparing to shrink,” O’Malley said.

O’Malley, who expressed respect for DCU’s Center of Excellence initiative, also countered the perception that investing in technology must necessarily be out of reach for community banks.

“Eastern is a mid-sized, $10-billion bank. We’re doing it and it’s going well. I certainly think it’s possible. I just think you have to be able to build a strategy and a case to take to your board and your stakeholders to get them to buy into the investment,” he said. “The challenge is that bankers aren’t always great at building a case for investment in technology.”