(Image credit: Dollar Photo Club.)
The global financial services industry spent $114 billion on mobility, cloud, and big data & analytics (BDA) technologies out of a total worldwide financial services IT investment of $455 billion, according to new research from IDC Financial Insights (Framingham, Mass.). The report, Worldwide Financial Services 3rd Platform IT Spend 2014-2019 – Opportunities Abound, notes that financial institutions’ investment in these transformational technologies will rise from 25 percent to 30 percent by 2019.
Karen Massey, Senior Research Analyst, IDC Financial Insights.
“The advance of the 3rd Platform and its four pillars—mobility, cloud, big data and analytics, 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,” comments 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.”
Financial institutions are looking to the three technology areas to achieve transformation in the following ways, according to IDC:
Mobility: IDC asserts mobility is increasingly seen as an enabler to increasing sales, improving productivity, and delivering customer and employee satisfaction. The mobility elements constituting IDC’s 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, according to IDC. The cloud elements included in the research firm’s 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’ firms objectives of accelerating innovation, driving optimization, improving compliance, and engaging customers by using data-driven decision making, IDC reports. The BDA elements making up the researcher’s 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