New Relic has released its Observability Forecast for Financial Services, revealing that high-impact IT outages cost financial services organisations an average of US$1.8 million per hour, underscoring the growing operational and financial risks facing the sector.
The report draws on insights from 156 IT and engineering leaders across banks, fintechs, insurers, investment firms and credit unions, and is based on data from New Relic’s 2025 Observability Forecast. It examines how financial services organisations are adopting observability in response to frequent outages, rising enterprise AI usage, and increasing regulatory, security and competitive pressures.
According to the findings, outages remain both costly and common. Twenty-nine percent of respondents reported experiencing high business impact outages at least weekly, only slightly below the all-industry average. Network failures were cited as the leading cause of outages, followed by software deployment issues and environmental changes. Beyond lost revenue, engineering teams spend an average of 31 percent of their time responding to disruptions, reducing their capacity to focus on innovation.
The report shows that financial services organisations are approaching modernisation cautiously, with observability adoption driven primarily by security, governance, risk and compliance requirements. AI is now the second most cited driver, with 38 percent of respondents identifying it as a key reason for investing in observability. Half of financial services companies now use AI monitoring, representing a six-point increase year-on-year, though still slightly below the cross-industry average. Nearly half of respondents said observability helps their organisations prepare for and manage AI application development and deployment.
Customer trust and digital experience performance are also major priorities. Thirty-three percent of respondents said increasing demands to improve customer experience make observability a critical capability, eight points higher than the cross-industry average. Over the next one to three years, 89 percent of financial services organisations plan to deploy browser monitoring, 80 percent plan to deploy mobile monitoring, and 77 percent plan to deploy synthetic monitoring.
New Relic Chief Technology Strategist Nic Benders said the cost of downtime means financial institutions can no longer afford limited visibility into their systems. He said observability provides the operational guardrails required to scale AI responsibly while maintaining security, compliance and reliable digital experiences.
New Relic Senior Vice President and General Manager for Asia Pacific and Japan Rob Newell (pictured) said financial services organisations in the region operate in one of the most tightly regulated and digitally demanding environments globally. He said observability has become critical for reducing outage impact, enabling confident modernisation and supporting responsible AI adoption, noting that it is now a business imperative rather than a purely technical capability.
The report also found that observability is delivering measurable business value, with 42 percent of financial services organisations reporting a return on investment of two times or more. More than half said observability improves cross-team collaboration and helps mitigate service disruptions and business risk. Financial services companies also lead the broader market in using observability for DevOps optimisation, automation of infrastructure provisioning, and incident response, as well as in the deployment of network and security monitoring capabilities.
The Observability Forecast for Financial Services is available here.
