How can financial institutions determine the correct digital modernization strategy that will help them achieve their goals while respecting the role of legacy technologies? Can organizations effectively modernize their operations, leveraging enabling technologies like AI, without risking the potential disruptions that change—even positive change—can bring?
This year at FinovateFall 2025, I caught up with Casey Ferguson, VP of Marketing at Zoot Enterprises to discuss the company’s phased approach to modernizing financial systems and integrating legacy technologies. Ferguson explains how effective transformations should embrace incremental progress, cross-functional collaboration, and layered fraud defenses.
At Zoot we look at modernization this way: it’s not about tearing everything down. When you look at this kind of ‘rip and replace’ mentality, you have to remember it can be pretty risky. It can be very expensive and it can be slow, as well. When you think about the pace of change, architecting the perfect environment, the world may have changed by the time you have a perfect picture of all this. So working on things incrementally and in phases can really make a difference.
Headquartered in Bozeman, Montana, and founded in 1990, Zoot Enterprises provides acquisition, origination, and decision management solutions for businesses ranging from leading banks and payment providers to automobile manufacturers and retailers. Zoot’s technology leverages advanced analytics to deliver actionable insights for compliance, risk management, fraud prevention, customer experience, workflow efficiency, digital transformation, and more. The company boasts more than 90 partners and providers, and 300+ data connections to access the most accurate and reliable data in real time.
Photo by Kanhaiya Sharma on Unsplash