Financial institutions spent more than 25% of IT budgets on just three transformative technologies this year

FRAMINGHAM, Mass., December 21, 2015 – According to a new IDC Financial Insights Perspective, Worldwide Financial Services 3rd Platform IT Spend 2014-2019 – Opportunities Abound (Doc #US40697215), the financial services industry spent $114 billion worldwide on mobility, cloud, and big data & analytics (BDA) technologies out of a total worldwide financial services IT spend of $455 billion. In other words, financial institutions spent more than 25% of IT budgets on just these three transformative technologies in 2015. According to the report, this will increase to almost 30% by 2019.

The new Perspective includes topline IT forecasts for:

• Mobile, cloud, and BDA

• Banking, insurance, and capital markets

• U.S. and Rest of World, totaling a Worldwide forecast

"The advance of the 3rd Platform and its four pillars – mobility, cloud, big data and analytics (BDA), and social business – has caused a fundamental shift in how financial services companies are consuming and budgeting for IT and applications. Furthermore, the 3rd Platform is creating the most significant opportunities for financial institutions in decades," said Karen Massey , Senior Research Analyst, IDC Financial Insights. "Financial institutions are increasingly leveraging these four pillars to transform their businesses, with a keen focus on three of the pillars – mobility, cloud and BDA."

Mobility: IDC asserts mobility is increasingly seen as an enabler to increasing sales, improving productivity, and delivering customer and employee satisfaction. The mobility elements comprising this topline forecast include:

• Mobile hardware – tablets, smartphones

• Mobile software – enterprise mobility management, mobile enterprise application development, mobile enterprise security, connectivity and policy management, mobile enterprise applications

• Mobile services – wireless data, mobile enterprise services

Cloud : Financial institutions are embracing cloud for both efficiency gains in business processes and improvement in customer acquisition and experience. The cloud elements comprising this topline forecast include:

• Software as a service (SaaS)

• Platform as a service (PaaS)

• Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)

Big Data & Analytics : Big data and analytics (BDA) is instrumental in financial services in terms of accelerating innovation, driving optimization, improving compliance, and engaging customers by using data-driven decision making. The BDA elements comprising this topline forecast include:

• Big data infrastructure – servers/compute, storage, networking, other datacenter
• High-performance data analysis (HPDA)
• Big data software – information management, discover and analytics, applications