CBA Live 2025 brought together over 1,700 attendees, including 700+ senior-level bankers, from across the retail banking industry to tackle the most pressing challenges and explore the innovations shaping the future of financial services. The event was marked by thoughtful discussions, bold ideas, and a clear call to action: financial institutions must evolve swiftly – but strategically – to level up and stay ahead in today’s banking environment.
Here’s a recap of the key themes and takeaways from this year’s event – and how Zoot is helping financial institutions succeed with confidence.
Regulatory Uncertainty: Adapting to Change
A common thread across the conference was regulatory uncertainty, driven by shifts in political leadership and anticipated changes in oversight. The new administration has brought with it a wave of unknowns, creating both opportunities and complexity around long-term strategic planning.
Banks are grappling with how to invest in new initiatives and technology while maintaining compliance in an environment where rules may shift quickly and unexpectedly. Staying ahead of evolving regulations is about more than a compliance checkbox – it’s essential for maintaining consumer trust and operational resilience.
By choosing partners that can quickly adapt to regulatory shifts, your organization will be better positioned to maintain compliance, reduce risk, and respond to change with confidence.
Fraud: Smarter Threats Require Smarter Defenses
CBA Live 2025 confirmed that fraud remains one of the highest priorities across institutions of all sizes, and for good reason. The types of fraud hitting the industry are expanding in both scope and sophistication. From business email compromise and unauthorized recurring charges to synthetic identities, banks are facing an increasingly intelligent and organized wave of criminal activity.
Notably, synthetic identity fraud now accounts for 3% of all applications – a figure that reflects how fraudsters are leveraging technology to create more believable identities, often selling legitimate account information to accelerate their attacks. It’s no longer enough to operate within your own data ecosystem; banks must look beyond traditional boundaries and adopt tools that allow for broader intelligence gathering and fraud mitigation.
Zoot’s Director of Marketing, Casey Ferguson, participated in an expert panel on fraud prevention during the event, highlighting the strategies necessary to stay ahead of these threats. The discussion covered emerging fraud tactics, the role of AI in fraud detection, and actionable steps financial institutions can take to not only mitigate the risk of fraud, but to reduce friction and preserve customer relationships.
Key technologies gaining momentum include:
- AI-powered document review, essential as fake documents become nearly indistinguishable from authentic ones.
- Advanced anomaly detection, such as identifying when an account email address changes significantly just before a large transfer.
- Machine learning-driven fraud detection models, now used by 59% of banks, with many also leveraging AI-generated narratives to enhance reporting.
Fraud prevention must now go beyond traditional KYC and KYB checks. It requires holistic data orchestration and intelligent decisioning, creating a multi-layered approach that will stop fraud in its tracks.
AI in Banking: Co-Pilot, Not Autopilot
AI remains a hot topic, but conversations at CBA Live this year emphasized the need for governed, intentional adoption. AI isn’t going to solve every business problem, but it can operate as a co-pilot to get your operations to where they need to be. Banks must differentiate between machine learning for large-scale data analysis and generative AI, which is still evolving when it comes to complex, high-stakes decisions.
Key concerns voiced at the event included:
- Clear risk appetite, cross-functional oversight, auditability, and continuous monitoring are essential when it comes to AI governance.
- Functionality, transparency, and ethics are critical checkpoints for deploying any AI-driven tools, especially if they are customer-facing.
- Institutions should seek partners who integrate AI to create actual value, not those who merely repackage AI capabilities as a premium feature to capitalize on the hype.
Ultimately, banks are most often seeking AI tools that work behind the scenes -enhancing efficiency, accuracy, and insight without adding new risks or costs.
Modernization: Outcomes Over Optics
“Modernization” is a buzzword often thrown around, but what truly matters is how the technology serves the bank’s goals and customers, not just how new it is. Conversations at CBA Live 2025 emphasized that tech investments should be driven by business outcomes, not trend cycles.
Whether it’s upgrading a core system or integrating new onboarding tools, banks need to define their desired outcomes first. For instance, if the goal is to reduce mortgage onboarding timelines, then modernization efforts should focus on time-to-market and iterative delivery, not a massive one-time overhaul.
Modernization for the sake of modernization has the potential to waste valuable time and resources. Banks must pursue strategic initiatives, beginning in the areas where there is the potential for the highest impact. The right partner will be able to break initiatives into stages, starting with a key area of impact and growing seamlessly over time to enable continuous value delivery and minimize risk.
Executives are increasingly being asked to evaluate existing vendors before bringing in new solutions, making breadth of services and consolidation potential critical factors in modernization efforts. Vendors that can replace multiple point solutions with a seamless, integrated approach not only streamline operations but simplify approvals, reduce long-term costs, and accelerate time to value.
Personalization and Customer Experience: Beyond Segmentation
In today’s world, customers expect the same tailored experience from their bank that they receive from platforms like Amazon. That’s driving a shift toward cognitive banking and hyper-personalization, which goes far beyond traditional demographic segmentation.
Key strategies in this space include:
- Customer profiling and behavioral insights
- Data-powered product and offer personalization
- Next Best Action modeling
- Integrated digital-to-branch experiences
The payoff? Stickier relationships, increased satisfaction, and enhanced brand loyalty.
However, many banks still struggle with siloed data systems that limit their ability to deliver on personalization promises. 65% of banks struggle to make effective use of fragmented and incomplete data across their organization.
Bringing in a partner who will integrate and unify your organization’s data, as well as bring in additional data providers to paint the full picture of your customer base, will enable your bank to take personalized experiences to a new level.
Collections: Intelligent Orchestration for Better Outcomes
A subtle but important trend emerging is the transformation of collections strategies. The future of collections is data-driven, intelligent, and customer-first. By taking a more nuanced, human-centric approach, banks can increase recovery rates while preserving customer relationships – especially critical in times of economic stress.
Instead of treating every customer the same as they enter the collections process, the use of advanced data orchestration enables your collections team to strategically prioritize and direct their outreach towards those who will be most responsive, in the ways they are most likely to respond.
Leveling Up with the Right Partner
The key takeaway from CBA Live 2025? Navigating uncertainty requires clarity, agility, and the right technology partner. With Zoot, banks and credit unions gain a trusted partner that delivers stability, flexibility, and unmatched processing power to help banks and credit unions:
- Stay ahead of regulatory change through flexible, configurable solutions.
- Detect and prevent complex fraud with sophisticated automation
- Modernize infrastructure at the pace of your business for maximum impact
- Leverage advanced data orchestration to deliver hyper-personalized, seamless customer experiences.
Our expert teams combine decades of experience with a commitment to world-class service, Zoot’s wide range of solutions are designed to help your financial institution navigate complexity, accelerate profitable growth, and improve customer experiences, all within a single, flexible solution.
We don’t just solve isolated problems – we help you connect the dots across your organization, driving long-term success.
Ready to tackle what’s next? Let’s connect.
