[kh:media-download]

September 8, 2026

Between fluctuating interest rates, evolving regulatory expectations, and growing competitive pressures, it’s not an easy time to be leading a financial institution. That’s why it’s more important than ever to have access to trusted guidance, peer best practices, and technology strategies to help you make confident decisions.

Last week at LIFT26: The Strata Users Virtual Summit for Financial Institutions, we provided those insights and more. We were proud to continue our decades-long tradition of bringing our financial institution customers together to learn from one another and explore the topics that matter most right now.

We shared exciting developments, from our recent combination with c. myers corporation and the forthcoming launch of our newest innovation, Strategic Financial Planning, to tips and tricks to get the most out of your Axiom platform.

If you missed the summit — or just want to relive some of the highlights — here are some of the key takeaways. 

Strata Financial Institutions Summit Watch on Demand Clickable Tile

1. Combining strategic expertise and technology is key to helping leaders navigate uncertainty.
Following the recent announcement that Strata has joined forces with c. myers corporation, Strata SVP Adam Johnson shared more about the history of c. myers and the strength of the combined organizations in the Financial Institution Leadership Welcome session. Our complementary solutions — Strata’s Axiom and c. myers’ advisory services and asset liability management (ALM) — fit together and build on each other to create even more value for customers.

This combined strength is particularly valuable as financial institutions navigate some of their biggest leadership challenges. During “The CEO Lens: What’s Really Keeping Leadership Up at Night,” Brian McHenry, Strata VP of Leadership & Consulting Services, explored how leaders can stay relevant amid growing competition and changing customer expectations.

His advice: Relevance doesn’t mean continually adding products or services. Instead, institutions can continue delivering value by understanding what consumers value now, anticipating how those needs will evolve, and focusing investments on the areas that matter most.

Forecasting can help identify those areas. By modeling the risks and potential impacts of investments over the long term, leaders can gain a clearer picture of which path makes the most sense to pursue.

2. AI delivers more value when it understands the context behind data.
In finance, data is everywhere. But turning that data into intelligence requires context that isn’t readily available in typical large language models (LLMs). Without an understanding of financial terms and relationships, AI tools can only produce plausible — but not always accurate — results.

That’s why we’re taking a deliberate approach to AI in Axiom, building capabilities that understand the meaning behind your information and address specific pain points.

In our “AI Vision and Roadmap” session, Strata Chief Product Officer Frank Stevens explored what’s next for AI in Axiom. He walked through the AI tools we’re launching, including Help Assistant, an AI-powered assistant that answers questions within Axiom, and AI-assisted data integration, which will help translate and map data coming into your system. We’re also developing capabilities to help solve for pricing, enabling institutions to calculate the rate or fee needed to hit a profitability target.

Integrated, AI-driven tools that understand context — both industry and organizational — can help you use your data to make better decisions faster.

3. Leaders are now expected to understand strategic impact 3+ years out. 
Annual budgeting and forecasting provide an important foundation for planning, but they’re limited to the near term. They don’t always answer the bigger question: What will happen several years from now if we make a major decision today?

“Introducing Strategic Financial Planning for Financial Institutions,” led by Strata Senior Director of Product Management Eric Wheeler, introduced our solution to that challenge. Launching in Q4 of this year, Strategic Financial Planning (SFP) is designed for long-range planning up to 10 years into the future. Institutions can use it to build and compare strategic initiatives directly on top of their baseline plans, and then isolate the incremental financial impact of each initiative to understand how it impacts the bigger picture.

This could be instrumental for helping institutions determine the impact of potential mergers and acquisitions, expansions into new markets and products, or branch consolidations. And the results aren’t limited to highly technical financial models. SFP produces easily understood, board-ready outputs so your finance team can turn complex analysis into informed, strategic decisions.

4. Incentive compensation management should be scalable, transparent, and automated.
During our Incentive Compensation Management customer panel, Pricila Dominguez, Compensation Director at Capital Farm Credit, and Isbel Guerrero, VP at BankUnited, shared why they chose Axiom’s Incentive Compensation Management.

For Dominguez, flexibility and scalability are critical. “Incentive compensation changes,” she said. “We always want to make sure we stay competitive. If we decided to change our plan in two years, we didn’t want to have to worry if the system is going to be able to adapt to what we’re trying to build.”

Axiom is designed to adapt as plans change. The system automates calculations, reducing manual inputs and the potential for errors. Even employee statements can be automated to give employees visibility into their progress toward goals and estimated payouts.

For Guerrero, the ability to scale was paramount. ICM provides the flexibility and transparency to accommodate her institution’s 35 incentive plans and 500 participants — while giving her team the tools to manage that complexity more efficiently.

“We always want to make sure we stay competitive. If we decided to change our plan in two years, we didn’t want to have to worry if the system is going to be able to adapt to what we’re trying to build.”
Pricila Dominguez, Compensation Director, Capital Farm Credit

5. Interactive visualizations make it easier to find meaning in complex data.
In “Turning Data into Visual Insights,” Strata Senior Solutions Engineer Heather Hinchley and Strata Consultant Josh Sacca explored how financial institutions can bring data together, visualize it in meaningful ways, and quickly identify trends, variances, and opportunities for improvement.

The goal of Visual Insights isn’t to replace the spreadsheet-style reporting that many finance teams rely on. Instead, it brings that reporting to life, making it easier to see what’s happening in the data and determine where to dig deeper.

The pre-built reports in Visual Insights provide a starting point that’s about 90% ready to use. From there, users can adapt the reports to meet their institution’s specific needs. Interactive “slicers” make it easy to filter the data and look at different elements, and predefined drill paths let users move from a high-level view into the details behind a particular variance or result.

And institutions aren’t limited to the reports that come pre-built. Users can create their own custom dashboards to focus on the metrics and information that matter most to their teams.

6. Resilient leaders know how to turn adversity into advantage.
LIFT26 wasn’t just about technology, data, and strategy. It also incorporated valuable leadership lessons for the people who are responsible for putting those tools and insights to work.

In the keynote address, “The Forging of a Leader: Turning Adversity into Triumph,” retired U.S. Navy SEAL Jason Redman shared lessons that resonate with leaders of all kinds. He talked about how people often get stuck when bad things happen. For finance leaders, that could mean market uncertainty, shifting priorities, and growing competition. But adversity shouldn’t be your stopping point.

The ability to overcome and keep moving forward is what creates momentum. As Redman emphasized, the people who get up and drive forward the fastest are the ones who ultimately thrive.

That may be one of the most important takeaways from LIFT26: The challenges facing financial institutions aren’t going away. But with the right data, technology, strategic perspective, and willingness to adapt, leaders can be better prepared to succeed through whatever comes next.

Want to dive deeper? Watch all of the LIFT26 sessions on demand.