アジア太平洋地域におけるコーポレートバンキングのテクノロジー・トレンド

Here at Celent we have just published the regional results of our Celent Technology Insight and Strategy Survey (2023) for Asia-Pacific, North America and Europe – the regions with the largest number of respondents. The full reports are available now to Celent clients.

As noted in Corporate Banking Priorities: Musings from Japan, the timing of the IT strategy reports coincided with my visit to meet clients in Japan – many of whom have pan-Asian and global banking activities. So, what did the CTISS survey highlight for Asia-Pacific banks, and what resonated in conversations with clients in-region?

Firstly, there are clear differences in budget trends across the region. On one hand, there are mature, developed markets with established banking infrastructure (and legacy technologies to match)! On the other hand, Southeast Asia has a preponderance of fast-growing economies and growth-minded policies enabled by the cross-border integration of real time payments systems. Technology budgets in Asia-Pacific banks are growing at an average rate of 4.1% compared to 2022, which is close to global averages. However, Japan and Singapore lag regionally and globally. India, Hong Kong, and Australia lead the way and look to extend those spending increases going into 2024.

Speed and agility are highly ranked drivers, but the established, larger banks in developed markets have an overhang of compliance, efficiency, and cost reduction initiatives. They are more encumbered by multi-country, complex operations, regulations, and supporting technologies, and will allocate up to 6% less to “change the bank” initiatives compared to small, more nimble competitors. The top 3 technology priorities (a subset of over 17 choices) are shown below. These are the clear winners in overall priority which are generally focused on improving the bank.

Operational efficiency and expense reduction feature as a top driver of spend, and this correlates to the high priority for process and workflow automation with RPA – the top-ranked technology priority. If the COVID-19 pandemic impacts proved one thing, it is that banks can no longer rely on armies of operations teams. Identity management and advanced analytics round out the top three technology priorities across the region. These will become pervasive capabilities for employee and client-facing solutions and services.

What about cloud adoption? 74% banks in APAC state that “we will move more of our workloads to the public cloud in the next 18 months,” and many of those also indicated plans to move business-critical workloads to the cloud. Key to growth however is that public cloud service providers must operate in-region, be aligned to local industry hosting and data regulations, and the required business-critical banking applications must also be available in-region from vendors. This can be a harder combination to unlock for smaller banking markets.

Asia-Pacific is a dynamic, diverse region and there is no "one size fits all" approach to solving technology challenges. However, IT spending continues to grow and banks across the region are transforming to more modern architectures to overcome compliance hurdles and meet client needs.