Banking and securities companies in the Middle East and North Africa will spend approximately $12.9 billion USD on IT products and services in 2015, an increase of 1 percent over 2014 revenue of nearly $12.8 billion USD, according to Gartner, Inc. This forecast includes spending by banking organizations on internal IT services (including personnel), IT services, software, data center technologies, devices and telecom services.
While the software and devices segments are smaller than telecom services, IT services, and internal services, they are experiencing stronger growth. Software and devices are the fastest growing segments with 7.4 percent and 7.1 percent increases in 2015, largely due to the customer-centric strategies of banks that drives customer insight projects and mobility initiatives that include an increasing use of tablets and mobile phones while better understanding customers with business intelligence tools and analytics.
“Software spending will perform better than other IT segments due to the reduction in operational budgets which will be a consequence of reduced oil revenue across these countries,” said Vittorio D’Orazio, research director at Gartner. “CRM solutions, as well as core banking software, will drive spending in this segment.”
Telecom services will be the largest segment in overall IT spending in the banking and securities market at $5.5 billion USD in 2015. This segment is forecast to decline 1.8 percent compared to 2014.
Further information on the banking and securities industry IT spending is available in the Gartner report: “Forecast: Enterprise IT Spending by Vertical Industry Market, Worldwide, 2013-2019, 1Q15 Update” at http://www.gartner.com/document/3028817. This vertical industries forecast provides total enterprise IT spending, including internal spending and multiple lines of detail for spending on hardware, software, IT services, and telecommunications for vertical industries and 43 countries within seven geographies.
