Issue link: https://insights.oneneck.com/i/1505396
T H E F I N A N C I A L S E R V I C E S C I O O F 2 0 2 5 | 7 Accelerating Innovation with Emerging Technology The financial services industry has long-been known for early technology adoption. Yet the pace has accelerated considerably with technology now transforming virtually all aspects of the industry—from banking services, to insurance claims, to investments, to credit card processing. Because of the fast rise of fintech disruptors, current CIOs are accelerating investments in leading-edge technologies such as AI, ML, and IoT to stay relevant and gain advantage. For financial services CIOs, today's top emerging tech priority for development over the next 5 years is IoT: not surprising, given that most customers—both consumer and business—access financial and account information from mobile devices. AI is the second-highest tech priority. The combination of AI and IoT will be a powerful one for financial services firms. For example, banks can collect and analyze ATM data from different geographies to determine where to put more kiosks to give customers easier access to services. They can also gain tremendous insights by analyzing customers' credit and debit card transactions or track who visits branch banks and when, to help tailor experiences and provide more personalized services. All of these things will generate new or additional revenues while improving customer experience—a win-win for both clients and financial services firms alike. Looking ahead to 2025, machine learning (ML) moves into first place in importance over both AI and IoT, with 65 percent of financial services CIOs surveyed expecting ML to be either "very important" or "critical" to their businesses. AI comes in second (61 percent) in their 2025 projection. AI also won the top spot by a long shot in being the most challenging to deploy. By prioritizing ML, financial services CIOs are recognizing they need to leverage the immense amounts of data their firms are accumulating. ML will help their companies churn through this data, identify patterns and trends, and gain insights not otherwise visible to human eyes because of the huge volumes of data involved. These insights are expected to bolster both bottom-line and top-line initiatives. $ $ € Today, IoT and AI are the top technical priorities for financial services CIOs. By 2025, ML becomes their top critical-for-business technology.