Financial services firms are looking to emerging technologies at a higher rate than organisations in other sectors, with artificial intelligence (36 per cent) and blockchain (24 per cent) are highlighted as the industry’s top priorities.

A survey commissioned by Canonical and carried out by 451 Research - with a sample size ranging from 750 to 1,100 across EMEA and North America - found that adopting emerging technologies often leads to increased complexity of IT environments.

Companies cited acute skills shortages in cloud platform expertise (46 per cent), information security (41 per cent) and machine learning (37 per cent).

The report revealed that 60 per cent of firms expect multi-cloud to be the architecture of their IT environments in the next two years.

Established financial services organisations are being driven to transform by new cloud-native FinTech competitors. As such, agility tops the list of cloud adoption drivers in the financial services industry – 47 per cent said time to market was a key incentive, compared to 32 per cent of businesses overall.

An increase in regulations for the sector mean that 43 per cent expect multi-cloud to help satisfy the granular compliance and security requirements, while 41 per cent anticipate that multi-cloud will help them to reduce the overall costs of cloud deployments through data centre consolidation.

Liam Eagle, research manager at 451 Research, commented: “The next few years will bring critical changes, including a major shift toward execution on cloud platforms.

“We expect hybrid IT strategies and partner-led managed services to be key elements in overcoming those obstacles.”

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