Half of banks around the world consider reducing costs in IT operations to be a significant challenge. At 80 and 65 percent respectively, this number is even higher in Germany and France. More than a third expect this to be an even greater challenge in future. Having said that, IT budgets in many financial institutions are on the rise: just under 50 percent of the banking IT decision-makers surveyed have a bigger IT budget this year than last. Conversely, 17 percent of banks have reduced their IT budgets.
Modernizing the IT landscape is one of the foremost issues on banks’ IT agenda. Almost half of the IT decision-makers interviewed in the course of the study expect the budgets made available for this purpose to rise in the next two years. Conversely, 9 percent are planning to spend less on modernization.
Alongside the modernization of the IT landscape, there are a range of other areas where higher IT expenditure is anticipated. For example, 61 percent of banks in both Germany and France are expecting budgets in the area of IT security and cyber-security to increase. Further, half of UK banks are planning to increase investment in digital transformation in the coming two years.
“Many banks are prepared to invest in state-of-the-art technology and are making bigger budgets available to do so. However, whilst banks are still making savings, these tend to be in other areas – predominantly IT operations,” says Eike Bieber, Senior Consultant – Banking and Insurance and author of the study. “At the same time, we anticipate that banks will continue to be very circumspect about their IT investments and will take a gradual approach to topics such as digital transformation.”
Information about the study
PAC surveyed 220 financial institutions around the world (including 18 in each of Germany and the UK as well as 23 in France) for the study on investment priorities in the banking sector. The points of contact were CIOs and IT managers.
PAC will make the full study available to its clients under the SITSI® Market Research license. For further information, please refer to the link below.