We reached out to IT professionals in financial services to gain a greater understanding of innovation and DevOps in their organization. We received responses from 165 professionals, ranging from engineers to CTOs working at a range of financial services organizations from FinTech startups and investment funds to insurance firms and the biggest global banks.

In this report we answer the following questions:

• How important is digital innovation to financial services?
• What's driving digital transformation?
• How mature are DevOps practices?
• What role does the cloud play?
• Are organizations struggling with security and compliance?
• Is there a skills shortage?
• Are incumbent enterprises about to be 'eaten' by FinTech SMEs?
• What do the next few years hold for this rapidly-changing industry?

Top Ten Findings:

1) 57% of companies think that competition from born-in-the-cloud startups is "very much" or "completely" a driver for digital transformation

2) The majority of respondents (58%) rate their DevOps maturity two or three out of five

3) Only 14% of respondents can bring a new software product to market in three months or less

4) The most commonly-cited barriers to rapid software releases are last-minute security tests and regulatory and compliance concerns

5) 33% of applications are hosted in the public cloud

6) The biggest barrier to migrating to the cloud is the lack of leadership/management support

7) Only 13% say that DevOps and cloud are "not at all" viewed as risky in the organization

8) 54% find it "very" or "extremely" difficult to find the right talent

9) 52% of financial services organizations think that born-in-the-cloud startups will take market share from incumbents in the next five years

10) Nearly 70% say that ML, AI and Big Data will be "very" or "extremely" important to their business strategy over the next year