Australian banking and securities IT spend to reach $18.5 billion

Australian banking and securities IT spending is set to grow 5.2% in 2020, according to new research by Gartner, who says spending is expected to reach A$18.5 billion.

The analyst firm says new investments in modern business intelligence (BI), augmented analytics and robotic process automation (RPA) software are behind the growth.

Globally, the banking and securities industry spends the most on information technology products and services, Gartner says. In Australia, it is the second-largest-spending industry after communications, media and services, representing 19.2% of total enterprise IT spending.

"The banking and securities industry continues to spend in pursuit of digitalisation, whether through digital business optimisation or transformation," explains Neha Gupta, research director at Gartner.

"The introduction of open banking in Australia is also driving new technology investments.

By 2023, the adoption of modern BI within banking and securities organisations will outpace the adoption within other industries, Gupta says.

Augmented analytics will increasingly leverage machine learning (ML) and drive new use cases in the market. Customer analytics is also a key focus for the banking and securities vertical, including visualisation tools that enable the bank to be relevant to individual and community needs.

The banking and securities industry will take the lead in deploying RPA, with most large banks adopting it in some form by 2023.

The earliest adopters were custom-building RPA functionality before commercial offerings became available. However, as RPA reached a tipping point in market acceptance in the early part of this decade, many more mainstream adopters began rolling out pilot projects. Even the most conservative banks are expected to begin experimenting with RPA within the next four years.

"Adoption of RPA will increase as awareness grows among business users," says Gupta.

"We expect almost all new RPA customers will be business buyers that are outside the IT organisation. Major growth will come from expansion across silos, often coordinated by or with IT.

 
According to Gartner, the two biggest factors currently impacting an organisation's overall IT budget and how it is spent are data and analytics requirements and cost optimisation.

"With the growth of digital business, organisations have ever-increasing data storage and compute needs, which vary greatly between different vertical sectors," Gupta explains.

"As the Internet of Things (IoT) grows, data will not be restricted to customer and product data, but also include data from the many sensors that make up the IoT."

 Gupta says cost optimisation is a key initiative in many organisations, driven by the economic situation of the organisation or the industry.

"It usually requires initial technology and service investment to achieve longer-term savings and may include initiatives relating to automation or cloud infrastructure — or even a complete overhaul of core applications," she explains.