COVID-19 may be dampening the business environment, but it is not slowing down investments in specific technologies. IDC says there is a surge demand from financial services for a new level of data analytics, automation, and AI capabilities to attain business continuity, digital resiliency, and operational effectiveness.
“The spending by the financial services sector in APEJ is estimated to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 35.8% to reach US$271 million in 2024. The financial services sector in 2024 is estimated to represent over 31% of the total RPA spending in the region,” says Ashutosh Bisht, senior research manager at IDC IT Spending Guides, Customer Insights & Analysis.
Although the growth rate took a slight dip in 2020, IDC estimates that RPA spending will pick up the pace and grow at a year-over-year (YoY) rate of 34.4% to reach over 103 million in 2021.
Why FSIs are doubling down on RPA
Leading organizations are doubling down on tech investments, such as automation, AI, and cloud to minimize the impact of the crisis, and are identifying opportunities to survive and thrive in the next normal.
As the CEO's agenda evolves to support digital initiatives, automation is fast becoming one of the cornerstones of the future enterprise.
Sneha Kapoor, research manager at IDC Financial Insights Asia/Pacific, said: “Many forward-looking institutions are centred on optimizing human-machine collaboration to drive new value and realities for the customers, employees, and business.”
She added that the economic, health, and business crises that ensued due to the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the expectations and priorities.
“Institutions are now increasingly leveraging the power of intelligent automation to resolve their myriad business problems and achieve goals such as enriching customer experience, optimizing operational efficiencies, and even, generating new revenue streams,” she continued.
Top spenders
In terms of the spending, the top 5 markets in 2020 are Australia, India, Singapore, Korea, and China. It is also worth noting that there are significant differences in RPA adoption maturity, priorities, and challenges across APEJ countries.
IDC expects that the deployments on cloud will grow at a significant rate. Cloud is becoming a principal route to bring in enterprise intelligence and data-driven innovation.
The institutions want the ability to make deployment model choices and achieve consistency in how these models enable how automation and AI solutions are built, deployed, and managed. Hence, this availability of choices will impact adoption decisions in 2021 and beyond.
