At this year’s North American Banking Leadership Summit, a single thread wove through every session, slide, and conversation: agility. But not just the tech-centric kind. Across all dimensions—product design, data infrastructure, client experience, and organizational change—the message was clear: agility is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s key to succeeding in the future of finance.
Held against the backdrop of economic volatility, rising customer expectations, and relentless fintech disruption, the Summit served as both a reality check and a blueprint. Speakers from Celent, Microsoft, FIS, Cornerstone Advisors, Zafin and leading North American banks unpacked where the industry stands—and where it must go next.
Here are five central themes that resonated across the event
Agility Demands More Than Speed—It Requires Focus
Banks know they need to move faster—but what are they moving toward? According to Celent’s Dimensions Survey 2025, only 15% of global IT budgets are allocated to growth initiatives, even as institutions identify product innovation and customer experience as top strategic priorities. This disconnect underscores a deeper issue: most banks are still stuck in “run the bank” mode, where compliance and maintenance crowd out investment in future-ready capabilities.
Agility starts with a clear-eyed view of where to focus. As Celent’s Colin Kerr emphasized, banks must prioritize simplicity over complexity. That means rationalizing legacy infrastructure, aligning around a modern architecture stack, and choosing technology partnerships that enable—not inhibit—rapid iteration. The most effective organizations are already treating agility not as an output, but as a design principle: baked into product development, data management, and even organizatonal structure.
Loyalty Is Broken—and Banks Need to Fix It Fast
Zafin’s Adnan Haider delivered a wake-up call during his session discussing loyalty: nearly 50% of banking customers say they receive no tangible benefits for their loyalty, and among those who do, fewer than 4 in 10 find those benefits relevant. For an industry built on relationships, this is a trust gap hiding in plain sight.
The underlying issue? Most loyalty programs were built for a transactional world—driven by credit card points, not human needs. Zafin’s approach reframes loyalty through a relationship-first lens, recognizing the full financial lives of households. Whether it’s tailoring benefits to caregivers, enabling shared rewards across generations, or linking loyalty to life-stage goals, the model shifts from perks to purpose. When rewards align with values—and not just spending habits—banks create stickiness, not gimmicks. And in an environment where deposit retention is paramount, that’s a powerful differentiator.
AI Is Maturing—But Agentic AI Changes the Game
The Summit went beyond the “AI as copilot” conversation to explore what’s next: agentic AI—autonomous, adaptive systems that act on behalf of users. As Microsoft’s Derrick Thompson explained, these agents don’t just assist, they take action. In a finance scenario demo, AI agents identified fraud, analyzed risk, and recalibrated organizational spending—all within 20 minutes, without human initiation.
This shift has profound implications. Banks now need to think about orchestration, governance, and data readiness on an entirely new level. As Zafin’s Rob Dunlap shared, success with agentic AI depends on more than the models—it requires high-quality, well-governed data, explainable outputs, and clear boundaries for human oversight. Done right, AI becomes not just a productivity tool, but a strategic co-pilot for transformation. But this also raises the stakes: banks must navigate regulatory uncertainty, data privacy risks, and internal resistance—all while ensuring AI doesn’t outpace their ethics
Core Modernization Isn’t One Path—It’s a Portfolio
As Don Free, Hawkeye Banking Advisory, and former-Gartner VP of Research outlined, banks are no longer asking if they should modernize core systems—but how. His session introduced a framework of three primary strategies: orchestration platforms (which simplify legacy cores via abstraction), domain isolation (which modernizes by product or business line), and simultaneous progression (which enables parallel modernization while running legacy systems).
Each option comes with trade-offs in operational risk, time to value, and budget. The message: modernization is not a monolith. Smaller banks may lean into mediation platforms to defer full replacement, while larger institutions explore progressive migration to composable cores. What matters is that the chosen approach aligns with business goals, risk tolerance, and the desired client experience. Importantly, banks should rethink modernization not as a one-time event, but as a capability-building journey. As Don put it, “There’s no finish line—only smarter iteration.”
Product Innovation Needs a Smarter, Simpler Tech Stack
Product leaders today are caught in a paradox: they’re expected to launch faster, personalize better, and deliver growth—all while wrestling with constrained budgets, siloed systems, and mounting compliance demands. The solution? Focus on “transformer products”—capabilities like client onboarding, payments, and pricing that serve as levers for broader transformation.
At the Summit, multiple sessions emphasized the enabling role of modular technology. Zafin showcased how low/no-code platforms, cloud-native pricing engines, and AI-enabled deal management tools can help banks compress time to market while improving governance and profitability. The goal isn’t just modernization—it’s composability. By building products as interoperable services, institutions can unlock agility across the lifecycle: from prototyping and pricing to billing and compliance. When infrastructure enables iteration, innovation doesn’t feel like a moonshot—it feels like momentum.
More to come from the Zafin Banking Leadership Summit – Europe
The 2025 Banking Leadership Summit didn’t just diagnose where the industry stands—it offered a blueprint for where it can go. Agility isn’t just about being fast. It’s about being intentional. It’s about aligning teams, systems, and strategies to deliver value—not someday, but now.
That’s what we explored at our North American Summit – and we’re just getting started. Join us at an upcoming Banking Leadership Summit and connect with the best and brightest as we discuss how to accelerate, deliver and unlock the next era of banking.
