In this episode of the Finovate Podcast, host Greg Palmer sits down with Caitlyn Truong, CEO and Co-founder of Zengines, fresh off the company's Best of Show win at FinovateSpring 2026.
Caitlyn traces her path from hardware and software engineering in telecom to financial services consulting, where she and her co-founders kept running into the same gap: critical business logic locked inside legacy core applications written in COBOL, RPG, and PL/1. With 92 of the top 100 banks running COBOL mainframe cores and over half of credit unions and regional banks operating on RPG cores, that black box isn't an edge case — it's the industry norm.
Key points from their discussion
- Beyond pathway tracking: Traditional lineage tools show where data travels. Zengines Contextual Data Lineage ingests entire legacy codebases to reveal not just what happens to data, but why and how — the calculations, conditions, and business rules embedded in the code itself.
- Answers in seconds, not months: Business analysts, data analysts, compliance teams, and technical staff get self-service answers to questions that previously required waiting on scarce subject matter experts.
- Three use cases driving urgency: Meeting regulatory compliance requirements, de-risking modernization and transformation programs, and making legacy data AI-ready with the trust and traceability regulated institutions need.
- The Finovate experience: Caitlyn shares how the Sherlock Holmes-themed demo brought "shining a light into the black box" to life on stage — and her advice for first-time demoers on using seven minutes to plant hooks that turn into real booth conversations.