Feb 3, 2017: ICT investment trends in financial markets report provides a comprehensive on the ICT investment in financial markets. It gives an in depth analysis on the expected change in ICT budget in the upcoming years, allocation across core elements of budget and distribution of ICT investment in areas such as cloud computing, business intelligence, and network services. The report further delineates about the distribution of financial market institution’s IT budget, factors influencing them and their investment priorities. It also gives a better understanding of financial market institutions’ preferred buying approaches and their Business and IT objectives that they want to achieve through their IT investment strategies.

ICT investment is the acquisition of equipment and computer software that is used in production for more than one year. ICT has three components: information technology equipment (computers and related hardware), communications equipment and software. Recent ICT trends, such as enterprise mobility, cloud computing, and business analytics has influenced ICT investment because these improvements and investment in the technology has optimized the cost structure, supported revenue growth, and streamlined operations within the enterprises. A company’s IT budget is affected by multiple variables, such as the state of the economy, the type of industry sector in which it operates and the financial health of the company. ICT spending amongst large enterprises is expected to see an increase due to the steady recovery of the international economy and improving investment environment.

The ICT spending is expected to remain stagnant in 2022. The ICT investors allocate their budget across the core areas of healthcare i.e. hardware, software, IT services, communications and consulting. In hardware spend, major expense is on desktop, laptops and server that incur almost equal cost. The rest of the expense is on Networking, external storage, tablet/ mobile, security applications and printers. The software budget allocation is divided between investment on virtualization, productivity and OS. In the upcoming year, the investment on the cloud and hosting service is projected to see an upward movement, especially for the email hosting. The spending on the online backup and recovery is expected to remain flat and expenditure on the web hosting may drop slightly.

Due to the economic slowdown in China, the UK exit from the European Union and Trump’s coming to power, the world is in state of political and economic instability. Thus, this is likely to impact the ICT investment framework a many say that this uncertainty has compelled them to reconsider their companies’ decision to purchase tech products and services. The IT buyers are less likely to invest in the products from the countries like Brazil, India and China. Also, the products from EU and UK are also under the scrutiny. The major concern of the investors is regarding the storage of data. Some of IT pros are worried about the difference in the privacy regulation between countries and how it will affect how and where the data is stored.

Financial Services are one of the pillars to the functioning of our economy. However, due to shifting business paradigms of the newly digitally these industries are most susceptible to disruption. Coupled with this problem, the growing demand for ICT governance and new regulatory requirement, it is driving the industry to invest more in ICT. Financial institutions are also using ICT to design products and services that will improve their labour productivity and are efficient for their consumers. Further, the financial markets are moving towards a centralized and highly digitalized banking system .Thus, these financial institutions are increasingly turning towards relatively new ICT technology like cloud computing to keep up with the demand of the internationally connected marketplace. The global IT spending was expected to reach 5000 billion dollar by 2026.

Another important factor that has contributed to the increased investment in ICT by the financial institutions is the impact of financial recession of 2008. As the economy is slowly picking up its pace, the lenders have began to realize the importance of due diligence in decision-making and hence have began to utilize ICT resources to mitigate and manage the risk.

Companies Covered
IBM, Microsoft, Amazon web services, Google, Cisco, Oracle, Informatica, EMC.

Key Factors Considered in the Report
Global ICT Industry
Global ICT market Outlook
Global Cloud Computing Trends
Mobile Phone subscribers Worldwide
ICT Market in Financial Sector
IT Investment trends