More than half of financial services firms are experiencing a drop in performance due to key digital services and applications at least once a week, according to a new report from Riverbed that found the industry is not moving fast enough to address digital change.

A survey of 1,000 decision makers in a range of industries, based in nine countries, found that 79 per cent of teams are held back by poor performance of digital systems at least a few times per month.

The survey also found that 37 per cent of respondents from the financial sector believe that digital strategies are being progressed too slowly in their industry. Reasons for this delay in adopting new technologies range from budgetary restraints (49 per cent), a lack of visibility across the digital or end-user experience (45 per cent) and having an overly complex or rigid legacy IT infrastructure (42 per cent).

Nearly all of those surveyed (95 per cent) said the financial services industry should move to improve digital performance in the next 12 months, or risk seeing negative consequences, citing loss of customers (44 per cent), loss of brand loyalty (43 per cent) and loss of sales revenue (40 per cent) as potential issues.

Carl Helling, regional director of financial services for the UK and Ireland at Riverbed Technology, said that despite huge investments from financial institutions in cutting-edge customer facing technology, banks are not realistically able to provide these across the entirety of their branch network.

“However, these organisations can make subtle changes to unlock the benefits of widespread digital transformation, by ensuring they have a modern infrastructure in place that is able to support digital services and remote local banks,” he said, adding that IT teams should be equipped with an integrated end-to-end monitoring solution for digital systems.

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