Australia’s financial services industry spent the most on information and communications technology (ICT) investments last year at $9.66 billion, and new figures from researcher IDC (News - Alert) showed Australian banks, insurers and financial services firms accounted for 22 percent of enterprise ICT spending last year. But the growth is expected to slow by 2015.

Federal and state government investments in technology came in second at $6.3 billion in 2011, followed by communications and media companies at $5.3 billion.

“The last few years we have seen very strong growth, particularly in IT [information technology] services as a result of IT transformation programs. It’s dominated by what CBA’s been doing in terms of spend,” IDC research manager, Emilie Ditton said. “That program’s coming to an end now, and another part of it is the industry is going through a period of margin contraction, and that will impact on technology spend.”

IDC expects ICT spending within the financial services sector to grow to $11.12 billion by 2015.

“Across the board, the predominant focus will be on customer centric business delivery,” Ditton said.

Figures from technology researcher Gartner (News - Alert) shows Australian insurers will spend around $5.2 billion on IT this calendar year, up from around 2.8 percent from 2011. Spending will be concentrated on hardware, personnel software and external IT services, among others.

According to Gartner analysts, consumer spending on mobile products tops all consumer categories in the U.S. in 2012. Mobile services are expected to generate 37 percent of total worldwide consumer technology spending in 2012, $0.8 trillion, rising to almost $1 trillion by 2016. Gartner predicts that consumer spending on mobile apps stores and content will rise from $18 billion in 2012 to $61 billion by 2016, and that spending on e-text content (e-books, online news, magazines and information services) will rise from $5 billion in 2012 to $16 billion by 2016.

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