IT spending by banking and financial securities firms is expected to grow by over 10 per cent to Rs 469 billion or around Rs 47,000 crore this year, research firm Gartner said today.
“Indian banking and securities companies will spend 469 billion rupees on IT products and services in 2014, an increase of more than 10 per cent over 2013 revenue of 427 billion rupees,” Gartner said in a statement.
This forecast includes spending by financial institutions on internal IT (largely personnel), hardware, software, external IT services and telecom, it added.
“New bank licences will be soon granted by RBI. This will trigger a new wave of IT spending across the country as RBI’s goal is to reach a higher local penetration for banking services and this means more branches,” Gartner Research Director Vittorio D’Orazio said.
Front-office technologies like branch-related hardware and software will be the sweet spot as well as new channels such as mobile and ATMs/kiosks, he added.
IT services is the largest overall spending category at almost Rs 15,500 crore in 2014 (33 per cent of the entire enterprise IT market), which confirms the interest of the banking industry for IT services, Gartner said.
However, software is forecast to achieve the highest growth rate among the top level IT spending categories at about 16.7 per cent this year, which will slow down in the following years compared to the IT services market, it added.