IT Services for the Financial Industry: Key Trends and Technologies for 2025

For financial institutions, IT is the backbone of every operation, transaction, and customer interaction. From trading floors to mobile banking apps, the right technology makes the difference between industry leadership and falling behind.

A lot is changing right now. There’s an exciting (if overwhelming) range of tech to deal with. We’ve put together a guide to what’s happening right now in IT for the financial services industry in 2025.

The role of information technology in financial services

Your organization's speed, resilience and customer experience now directly depend on technology capabilities. Without strong technology foundations, modern financial services simply couldn't function—let alone keep up with the pace of this high-risk, highly regulated industry.

Today's financial institutions rely on IT infrastructure to:

• Process millions of transactions securely and instantaneously
• Meet regulatory requirements across jurisdictions
• Protect sensitive customer data
• Deliver customer experiences across digital and physical channels
• Make new products and scale while maintaining stability

IT is the nervous system connecting front office (client-facing services), middle office (risk management, data analytics), and back office (reconciliation, reporting) operations.

The tools involved with these encompass infrastructure, systems, software, security protocols, automation tools and data management.

As the lines between traditional finance and fintech blur, there’s a lot of complexity to deal with. Let’s look at some of the challenges that need dealing with.

What IT challenges do fintech companies struggle with the most?

1. Hackers targeting financial institutions

The financial sector is a prime hunting ground for cybercriminals.

IBM’s Threat Intelligence Index found that finance and insurance was the second most targeted industry for cyberattacks in 2024, behind manufacturing.

This isn't random bad luck. It's a calculated focus by threat actors who follow a simple rule: go where the money is.

There’s plenty of data out there showing the scale of the problem:

• 65% of financial services organizations reported being hit by ransomware in the past year – up from 64% in 2023
• Banks were the most popular target for phishing attempts in 2024, accounting for 43% of financial phishing attempts
• In the first half of 2024, phishing attacks in India’s financial sector surged by 175% compared to the same period last year

Cyber incidents have emerged as the primary concern for global financial institutions in 2024, with 43% of respondents in the Allianz Risk Barometer ranking it as their most significant risk.

With AI-powered attackers using multiple openings at the same time, protecting financial infrastructure has never been more challenging or more essential.

2. Keeping up with evolving financial regulations

Managing regulatory compliance has become a minefield of complexity and cost for financial institutions.

Things change a lot, thanks in part to recent high-profile bank failures, technological innovation, and shifting political priorities. It’s not easy to keep up.

Global financial regulators are intensifying their enforcement actions, and the penalties for missteps are increasingly severe:

• Global regulators levied 80 fines in the first half of 2024 alone, totaling $263,252,003 for non-compliance. This is a 31% increase over the same period in 2023
• AML regulation penalties rose by 87% to $113.2 million, while KYC fines increased by 102%, reaching a record high of $51 million
• The GDPR Enforcement Tracker Report 2024 shows an increase of fines in the finance sector. Five fines exceeding €1m each have been dished out during 2024, compared to only one in the previous year.

Fines like these (most often for data breaches) are often paired with additional costs of compensation claims, lost customers, damaged reputations, and executive resignations. It gets expensive.

With regulatory requirements that vary by region, product type, and customer segment, maintaining compliance across frameworks has become a complex, resource-intensive task. You’ve got regulations around standards like PCI DSS (for credit cards), GLBA (US customer data), and GDPR (EU general data).

In fact, changes in legislation and regulation rank among the top concerns for financial services, with 26% of industry professionals identifying it as a significant risk factor.

3. High downtime costs and system resilience

For financial institutions, system failures can range from a slight inconvenience to an existential threat.

The average annual downtime cost for financial services organizations has reached a massive $152 million in 2024. When critical systems go offline, the meter starts running immediately:

• Revenue loss accounts for $37 million per year - nearly one-quarter of total downtime costs
• Financial enterprises can face costs exceeding $5 million per hour(!) during certain outages (outside of potential regulatory fines and penalties that might result from service disruptions)

How do these events happen?

Human error remains the leading cause of cybersecurity-related downtime. Gartner predicts that a “lack of talent or human failure will be responsible for over half of significant cyber incidents by 2025”—partly due to the cybersecurity skills shortage. This highlights the critical importance of both technical controls and proper employee training.

And many institutions still struggle with legacy infrastructure challenges that make modernization difficult: core banking systems dating back decades, mounting technical debt, complex integrations between old and new systems, and hard-to-maintain custom applications.

4. Managing global and remote workforces

As fintech companies grow, teams often become distributed across multiple countries. Managing devices, access rights, and data security for a global workforce becomes complicated.

Consider the scale of the workplace transformation: around 30% of finance and insurance employees now work fully remotely, with an additional 38% in a hybrid work arrangement. This out-of-office trend has created numerous endpoint security challenges and exposed new attack surfaces.

For financial firms with a geographical spread, the challenges go beyond security. There’s a host of operational concerns:

• Provisioning and deprovisioning equipment efficiently across borders
• Keeping consistent compliance with rules that vary by jurisdiction
• Supporting employees across multiple time zones and languages
• Managing device lifecycles from procurement through secure disposal

Technology in modern financial services: Key trends to watch

1. Cybersecurity infrastructure for threat prevention

With financial institutions more likely to face cyberattacks than other sectors, security has moved far beyond just firewalls and antivirus tools.

Today's financial cybersecurity involves:

• Zero-trust architecture that treats every access attempt as potentially malicious
• Advanced endpoint protection systems that identify threats in milliseconds, essential since 68% of organizations have experienced endpoint compromises
• New access controls like biometric authentication, the adoption of which is growing at an annual rate of 15% in the banking sector
• AI-powered behavioral analytics for fraud detection, prediction modeling, and improving security infrastructure

On a positive note, financial companies are improving their ability to stop attacks before they cause significant damage. In 2024, 46% successfully halted ransomware attacks before data was locked away, compared to just 14% in 2023—showing that investments in resilience are paying off.

2. Compliance automation for regulatory alignment

With regulatory penalties for financial institutions surging, manual compliance processes have become unsustainable. And as we saw above, the rules are constantly changing. Thankfully, there are new tech advancements that can help you keep up.

Compliance automation, often powered by AI, is delivering remarkable results. According to one report, 60% of businesses say that AI has improved their compliance processes. It also showed that two thirds of surveyed businesses automate between 25-75% of their compliance-related tasks.

There’s a variety of workflows that can be helped by automation: regulatory reporting, risk assessments, transaction monitoring, KYC checks, and more.

The emergence of large language models and natural language processing makes combing through regulatory docs much easier. They can translate, summarize, and pick out relevant data in seconds.

These systems can automatically adapt to regulatory changes across jurisdictions. This is a super useful capability for global institutions navigating all those complex frameworks.

3. 24/7 IT support for operational continuity

When downtime costs for financial institutions are so expensive, around-the-clock support is essential for survival. The stakes are extraordinarily high: financial firms frequently commit to 99.99% uptime SLAs, allowing for less than five minutes of downtime per month.

Waiting until Monday morning to fix critical issues isn't an option—so industry leaders are keen to keep things running. Round-the-clock monitoring is an important method:

• ’Follow-the-sun’ support teams that ensure continuous coverage
• Advanced monitoring systems that detect issues before they impact customers
• Automated remediation tools that reduce downtime and improve incident detection
• Proactive maintenance: 45% of financial IT professionals update network documentation weekly, more than other industries

All of this is certainly worth doing: according to one source, fintech companies without 24/7 monitoring take 60% longer to detect security breaches.

Even small periods of downtime can be costly. On customer-facing platforms, waiting longer than a few seconds can cause users to drop out. Onboarding in fintech apps is vulnerable to delays, for example: 40% of users abandon the sign-up process when it takes too long.

Edge computing implementations can help—they’ve been shown to enable a 69% reduction in transaction processing time. In high-frequency trading platforms, for example, this could mean thousands more transactions per second—potentially a huge competitive advantage.

And AI support chatbots can resolve a huge number of issues almost instantly, without the need for human intervention. This might involve password resets, network issues, errors with apps, or small issues that just need users to be educated.

4. Cloud platforms for scalable operations

The financial sector's cloud transformation is accelerating, with 42% of institutions prioritizing cloud migration initiatives. A 2024 industry report found that 94% of financial services leaders see cloud as the future of IT operations, with 83% of organizations that have migrated reporting significant cost savings.

Organizations are moving away from monolithic, on-premises legacy architectures. Rather than pay big up-front IT fees, they’re moving toward more flexible, consumption-based cloud models.

The preferred strategy is mixed-use; 90% of financial services organizations are using hybrid cloud solutions, and 71% have embraced multi-cloud approaches.

This means they can keep sensitive core systems in private clouds while using public cloud services for customer-facing apps, analytics or other front-end infrastructure.

Migrations can be complex, but worthwhile: 83% of financial services firms report significant cost savings after moving to the cloud.

Elasticity is one part of the savings deal: it means you can handle sudden transaction spikes in busy periods without being over-provisioned when it’s quiet. Cloud platforms can scale resources (up or down) when needed, so you only pay for what you need when you need it.

There’s also the improved security aspect with cloud—financial firms using hybrid cloud report 35% fewer breaches than those with traditional infrastructure.

Two thirds of financial services firms use multi-site active/active cloud builds for their most critical applications: a higher rate than other sectors. This helps them keep high availability and minimizes downtime during disruptions.

They also benefit from better disaster recovery with cloud. Financial institutions are 12% more likely than those in other industries to achieve a recovery time objective (RTO) of one hour or less for mission-critical applications.

Cloud enables faster product development and deployment, too. Operational cost savings only make up about 40% of total value—the rest comes from increased revenue via improved customer experience and faster product launches.

5. Real-time data and AI for smarter decision-making

The AI revolution in financial services has created a $61.6 billion market that transforms how institutions understand risk, detect fraud, and serve customers.

Machine learning models and data platforms now power key advancements:

• Fraud detection: AI models analyze multiple transaction variables in milliseconds, reducing false positives significantly
• Improve credit scoring: with ability to crunch more data, lenders can make more inclusive lending decisions, expanding access to credit for underserved populations
• Personalization: AI helps segment customers based on detailed behavioral and financial data. This allows for highly personalized product recommendations and marketing.

The insights that can be mined from big datasets can’t be underestimated. According to one study,

“a leading Asian bank used advanced analytics to explore several vast datasets, including customer demographics, credit-card statements, point-of-sale data, online and mobile transfers and payments. This helped to uncover over 15K micro segments in their client base. This revelation prompted the bank to create the next-product-to-buy model, which led to a threefold increase in sales.”

Consider the transformation in risk modeling, for example. AI and ML mean that it benefits from:

• More accurate forecasting
• Real-time analysis of large and complex datasets
• Improved detection of non-linear risks
• Automation of risk assessment processes

6. Workflow automation to boost efficiency

RPA (Robotic Process Automation) adoption has reached new heights in financial services, with institutions capturing dramatic improvements across high-volume processes.

The numbers tell a compelling story:

• Cost savings of 30–70% for routine financial operations
• Processing speeds up to 90% faster than manual methods
• Accuracy rates reaching 99.5%, compared to 5–10% error rates in manual processes
• ROI averaging 250% within two years of implementation

These efficiency gains are transforming critical financial workflows:

• KYC and customer onboarding—previously taking weeks—now complete 40-60% faster with automated data extraction and verification. One mid-sized bank reduced KYC error rates from 12% to just 2% through automation
• Loan processing times have decreased by 70%, with applications now processed in as little as 15 minutes versus the previous 5-7 day standard
• Reconciliation processes that once consumed countless hours now see 80-90% reductions in manual effort through automated matching and exception handling

7. Digital interfaces that enhance customer experience

With 1.75 billion digital banking users worldwide, the quality of digital experiences directly impacts market share and customer retention.

As of 2024, 64% of global financial institutions have deployed at least one form of biometric authentication—a cornerstone of secure, intuitive digital banking. Fingerprint scanning is the most widely used (57% of banks), followed by facial recognition (32%) and voice recognition (24%).

Other key digital experience trends include:

• Seamless omnichannel banking: Customers expect unified experiences across mobile, web, and in-branch services
• AI-powered chatbots: These now handle 70–90% of customer queries without human intervention, providing 24/7 support and freeing up staff for more complex issues
• Mobile-first design: With 60% of Millennials and 57% of Gen Z primarily using mobile banking apps, banks are prioritizing intuitive, minimalist mobile interfaces and real-time notifications to keep users engaged and informed

8. API integrations for connected ecosystems

Open Banking APIs processed 137 billion calls globally in 2025, up 427% from 2024. This connected infrastructure powers some transformative shifts:

• Embedded finance ecosystems: APIs enable non-financial platforms (like ecommerce stores or budgeting apps) to integrate banking services directly into user workflows
• Enterprise integrations: APIs bridge financial systems with business tools like ERPs and CRMs

The API economy makes everything work together. It lets institutions participate in larger value chains, rather than just offering isolated products.

This connected approach creates stronger customer relationships. It means users enjoy contextual, embedded financial services that meet their needs at the exact moment they arise.

9. Blockchain and AI for next-gen financial products

The convergence of blockchain and artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping financial services.

As these technologies mature, they are moving from pilot projects to production-scale deployments, transforming everything from payments to risk management.

Some key impact areas include:

• Smart contracts: The global smart contracts market is projected to reach $134.4 billion by 2033, automating complex B2B settlements and reducing manual reconciliation.
• Decentralized identity: Blockchain-based identity solutions can cut KYC compliance costs, according to Deloitte
• AI Trading: AI-powered algorithmic trading platforms now process market data and execute trades in microseconds
• AI-powered robo-advisors: These are surging in popularity, managing assets of around $1.8 trillion in 2024

Together, these futuristic systems are creating more resilient and exciting financial ecosystems.

Choosing the right IT provider: What to look for in 2025

When selecting an IT partner for your financial institution, you’ll want to consider these critical factors:

Global reach and local expertise

Look for providers who offer consistent service quality worldwide, not just in the US. They need expertise in local compliance requirements, language support and cultural nuances that align with both your global standards and regional needs.

End-to-end lifecycle management

Seek comprehensive device lifecycle management, not just procurement. You’ll want strategic procurement, streamlined deployment, ongoing maintenance, refresh cycle planning and certified data erasure, eliminating security vulnerabilities and compliance issues.

Time zone coverage and support availability

Your IT provider should offer genuine follow-the-sun support with teams distributed globally, so you're never left waiting for critical assistance when your organisation operates 24/7.

Compliance and security integration

The right provider embeds security at the device level through strong endpoint security, automated IT compliance controls and full mobile device management for distributed workforces.

Systems integration capabilities

Your provider should naturally connect with your existing technology ecosystem through HRIS integration, procurement system connections and single sign-on compatibility, creating efficient digital workflows.

How Deel IT powers financial operations worldwide

Financial institutions globally trust Deel IT to manage their technology lifecycle, from procurement to secure decommissioning. Our platform delivers:

• Global device procurement and deployment in 150+ countries
• Built-in compliance with financial industry regulations
• 24/7 support across all time zones
• Secure endpoint management and monitoring
• Seamless integration with HR and finance systems

Voiceflow saved 3 days per new hire and $10k+ in equipment delivery processes after switching to Deel IT, while Lloyd's List Intelligence expanded to new markets with our global IT support.

Ready to transform how your financial organization manages IT? Book a demo today to see how Deel IT can support your global operations.