As financial services organisations contend with evolving risks and demands in a cost-pressured environment, companies with a competitive edge in the sector are those who can deploy digital transformation tactics to bring enterprise-wide value. But are financial services firms ready to unlock unprecedented growth through digital innovation?
This report draws upon the perspectives from 612 leaders across the financial services industry. While it reveals that the financial services sector is most likely to generate profit from its AI investments, there is also a growing need to move beyond siloed, short-sighted tactics to build a business fit for the future.
Persistently high inflation, geopolitical pressures, regulatory challenges, and slow global economic growth are combining to challenge businesses across financial services. Interest rate volatility is dampening consumer spend and asset performance, while compliance and operational costs are steadily increasing, forcing executives to revisit growth strategies. At the same time, organisations across financial services are coming under pressure both to generate value and to operate within tighter margins.
Survey participants
Key findings for financial services leaders
Risk and regulation
75% of financial services executives state that complex regulatory developments are the factor most heavily denting their investment confidence.
Data-led decision-making, AI-enabled solutions and modernisation of legacy platforms are at the centre of the sector’s coping strategies. With the right foundations in place, AI is providing a means to accelerate the modernisation of the control environment, predict change impacts and minimise drift.
Data and artificial intelligence
92% of financial services companies are generating profits from AI. However, only 32% of FS companies are generating returns at scale.
Our research uncovers key actions that digital leaders are taking to help realise benefits at scale – taking an ecosystem approach with use cases drawing on multiple AI capability sets, pushing the envelope by radically changing end-to-end value chains (vs. incrementalism) and getting the right foundations in place.
Simplification and modernisation
58% of executives have indicated that flaws in their foundational enterprise IT systems are disrupting business-as-usual on a weekly basis.
Mounting tech debt and the temptation of new technologies has left the sector with a tangled web of systems; but the sector is starting to act. Digital leaders are applying multi-modal thinking and contemporary product-platform based operating models, to simultaneously deliver innovation while modernising the core.
About KPMG's global tech report for financial services
For business leaders in financial services seeking to harness technology to help fuel operational efficiency and growth, our report provides insights into key issues that are challenging the financial services sector. From mitigating risks in technology integration to securing operations against escalating cyber threats, we explore strategies tailored to meet the sector’s unique challenges.
Deciphering and managing the regulatory maze, and closing the gap in risk management and compliance, requires high levels of intelligence and efficiency. The speed of technology innovation is creating new opportunities to tackle these issues through more modular, flexible architectures, artificial intelligence, and data, supported by partnerships with trusted organisations across the private and public sector ecosystem.
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KPMG global tech report 2024: Financial services insights
Explore key insights fuelling digital innovation across financial services.
