- Key insight: Zions says its core modernization project, which wrapped up in 2024, gives it an advantage over other regional banks that are seeking to take advantage of new technologies.
- What's at stake: U.S. regional banks, including Zions, are trying to keep up with larger institutions that are making big investments in AI and digital assets.
- Forward look: Zions plans to start experimenting with stablecoins and tokenized deposits later this year.
The technology leadership team at Zions Bancorp. in Salt Lake City is getting a new look.
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Jennifer Smith, Zions' longtime chief technology and operations officer, is leaving the $89 billion-asset company, and her responsibilities are being split between two Zions executives.
Smith hasn't disclosed her future plans, but she wrote to American Banker that she's leaving Zions "with deep affection for my teammates and immense pride in what we've built together."
Her departure comes more than a year and a half after Zions completed a core systems modernization, an ambitious project that spanned more than a decade.
Zions executives argue the modern infrastructure gives the bank a leg up as the industry contends with rapid technological change, including advances in artificial intelligence and the rise of digital assets in banking. Regional banks such as Zions are seeking to keep pace on technology with deep-pocketed megabanks.
Still, Zions is not looking to be first out of the gate, and is instead taking a relatively cautious stance on both AI and stablecoins.
Leading the way for Zions are Margaret Mayer, the bank's chief information officer, and Ken Collins, its chief transformation and operations officer. The two executives are partnering to helm the company's enterprise technology and operations unit following Smith's departure.
"AI is a critical enabler for us, and we have been putting in the governance, the policies, the standards, for AI, for us to be able to leverage it throughout the enterprise," Mayer said in a recent interview.
Zions has taken a relatively measured approach to AI, according to David Chiaverini, an analyst at Jefferies. He sees an opportunity for regional banks to use AI to become more efficient.
Zions reported an efficiency ratio of 62.6% for full-year 2025, which was down from 64.2% the previous year, meaning that its expenses decreased as a percentage of revenue. Its employee headcount has fallen from a peak of about 10,300 in 2019 to below 9,200, according to the company.
Still, Zions recorded a higher efficiency ratio last year than certain other regional banks, including Fifth Third Bancorp, Regions Financial, M&T Bank and Pinnacle Financial Partners.
Chiaverini wrote in a recent note to clients that Zions is using AI for certain targeted workflows, including fraud detection.
"Zions management stresses that the bank remains in the early stages of integration and has deliberately avoided deploying fully autonomous AI in client-facing or critical decision-making processes," Chiaverini wrote.
Mayer said that Zions has been building an AI platform for the entire enterprise, using Google Gemini. The company is working on finding use cases that will improve the company's efficiency.
Collins told American Banker that Zions currently uses AI to process unstructured documents, which has helped speed up the bank's processes for opening new accounts, onboarding customers to products and originating loans.
"Previous to that — whether they're customer documents, internal documents, supplier documents — people had to … look at all these documents, process them, see what was missing," Collins explained.
In remarks last year, Zions CEO Harris Simmons said the bank gets 330,000 emails each year from people who want to change their address or make other such revisions. "We believe a lot of that can be done with AI and automation," Simmons said at an industry conference in September.
At another conference on Tuesday, Zions President and Chief Operating Officer Scott McLean argued that the company's investment in upgrading its core loan and deposit systems, a project that Smith led, provides it a "massive advantage" because the bank "is still out in front of everybody else."
"If you want to survive in a digital world, you have to be digital at the core, okay?" McLean said in remarks at an RBC Capital Markets conference. "And the fact that we have all of our loans and deposits on one data model sounds kind of boring, but it's a big deal."
Stablecoins are another area where Zions is seeking to modernize amid rapid industry-wide change.
The company that helped the Utah-based bank modernize its core loan and deposit systems, Tata Consultancy Services, has software that can be used for tokenized deposits and has been deployed elsewhere in the world, but not in the U.S., according to McLean.
Zions is planning to start using the application, called Quartz, in its innovation lab within the next one to two months, McLean said.
"And we'll be experimenting with stablecoin and tokenized deposits later this year," he added. "There is no other regional bank that I think is going to be able to do that because this application is directly tied into our core loan and deposit system. Everybody else is going to have to create that linkage."
Still, McLean offered a note of caution about the opportunities that lie ahead with stablecoins, saying that the issue is finding use cases.
"So we're going to be like Don Quixote, out there trying to find the use cases, although I think we're going to find them. We're not going to have to get all the way to the windmill to find them," he said.
