Owing to the transition of the Indian banking sector to a cashless society which is creating many opportunities of technology investments into digital payments infrastructure, IT spending in banking and securities firms in India will increase by 11.7 per cent in 2017 to reach $9.1 billion, Gartner has said.
Several top banks in India are investing heavily into contactless payment, which uses near field communication (NFC) mechanisms, which is also propelling many investments into devices.
Devices spending in the Indian banking sector will grow the fastest at 20 per cent in 2017, followed by IT services at 15.8 per cent. Firms in the banking and securities industry are investing more in devices to upgrade their existing infrastructure.
“Indian banks are getting back on track after slower IT spending the last two quarters, which was prompted by demonetisation. However, as banks focus on enhancing the legacy infrastructure and making digital transformation the primary goals for the banks, we will see more investments flow into newer concepts like artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain,” said Moutusi Sau, Principal Research Analyst at Gartner.
“Financial services firms are lagging behind global top-performing organizations in relation to digital transformation. They hope that doing ‘more of the same’ will equate to improved performance,” added Rajesh Kandaswamy, Research Director at Gartner.
The banking and securities industry forecast provides total enterprise IT spending for 43 countries within 11 regions. This forecast provides total enterprise IT spending for internal spending and spending data on data centre systems, devices, software, IT services and telecom services.