Why Financial Data Orchestration Still Breaks and How Zelody Fixes It

If you’d asked me if data orchestration is still a problem for banks in 2026, I would’ve assumed no. I would’ve said, aren’t we in the age of AI where software data stacks are all interconnected? I’ve been out of the financial services ecosystem as an operator for 4 years now, so things must have changed significantly. But I would be lying to myself if I thought that was true.

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In today’s financial landscape, banks and fintechs must process massive volumes of data to make real-time decisions about onboarding, underwriting, and fraud prevention. Yet, despite investing heavily in digital transformation, most financial institutions still struggle with the same fundamental issue: their data lives in silos.

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1. The “Single Persona” Struggle. Banks often struggle to stitch a customer’s profile since financial lines of business can operate in silos. On the loan side, the applicant may be flagged for a past default. On the credit card side, alternative data may show recent financial recovery. Data orchestration helps adopt a non-linear approach. It involves running multiple data sources in tandem to create a complete customer profile.
2. There isn’t a dearth of financial products; customers choose what they like. It is no surprise that consumers have products across multiple financial institutions. They go to BofA for checking, JPM for mortgage, and Citi for their credit card. One bank will never serve all their needs. This is where Tier 2 and Tier 3 banks struggle. They’re nimble but often lack the integration resources to stitch together data across business lines. If done well, certain patterns of transactions and customer behavior should enable point-in-time triggers.
3. The Limits of Legacy Integration. Solutions like MuleSoft have long dominated financial services integration, but they weren’t built for today’s complexity and age of AI. The real challenge is unifying duplicate records, stitching together incomplete datasets, and creating intelligent customer knowledge graphs that adapt in real time.

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We're excited to announce our investment in Zelody in partnership with Cameron Ventures, The Fintech Fund, & others. 

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Zelody was born out of CEO and Founder Ann Sabatino, solving this problem at Global Payments and Treasury Prime. Ann experienced the challenge firsthand, ripping out legacy solutions and building an internal orchestration layer to ingest disparate sources of billing and onboarding data, then normalizing the ETL feeds. The turning point that got us excited was her approach of using agents to build the connective tissue between these data sources.

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At the core is the Master Orchestrator Agent—a controller that harmonizes all data sources.

1. Centralized Data Management – A unified source of truth across onboarding, monitoring, and risk. It continuously adapts to evolving schemas across vendors. 
2. Operational Efficiency – Automated workflows that cut costs and improve speed. It performs intelligent mapping and conflict resolution.
3. Data Accessibility – Empowering every team with the insights they need, when they need them. It coordinates multiple autonomous agents to normalize, enrich, and validate data. 
4. Compliance & Security – Guardrails built in to protect both customers and institutions. It “learns” from prior flows, reducing future integration lift. 

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Given the proliferation of agentic workflows, we believe Zelody could remediate this challenge without user intervention and automatically stitch a customer's profile from pre-determined datasets. This would ultimately enable them to create a knowledge graph of customer profiles without custom logic. It's more reliant on using datasets that train the agent to enable “intelligent mapping.”

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So why now?

Founder and CEO Ann Sabatino explains it this way. 

“Chips are faster, LLMs exist, all while vendor sprawl has only increased, and regulatory pressures around data have only mounted. Zelody saw the opportunity to build something that couldn’t have existed even two or three years ago. Orchestration-like infrastructure is no longer optional, and we automated it. We made it real and are seeing early success with financial institutions.”

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The impact is already visible for banks who have been early partners:

“Zelody has truly revolutionized our operations at First Fidelity Bank. By seamlessly integrating all our software, they've been a game-changer. The speed at which they've executed this would have taken our teams years and cost a fortune, potentially hindering our ability to fund other vital projects. The magic lies in their AI and agent platform, making API orchestration achievable with our current team. We didn't even need to bring in development experts or professional services to go live!

Zelody’s platform is a perfect fit for technology-forward banks like ours, which seek sophistication without a full development team. Our roadmap timelines have shortened, and our go-to-market capabilities now rival even the most sophisticated banks”.
- John Symcox, SVP, Chief Innovation Officer at First Fidelity Bank

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After a year quietly working with banks and fintechs, Zelody is emerging from stealth with live production use and accelerating demand. Over that time, it’s been a pleasure working with Ann, Douglas Gastich (CTO), and the team on the formation of Zelody. Data orchestration is a long-standing problem. With the proliferation of agentic workflows, we believe Zelody will become the standard infrastructure for most financial institutions and fintechs.