As IDC’s Asian Financial Services Congress moves into its 2026 edition, the financial services industry finds itself at the cusp of a transformation seen only once a generation with the rise of AI: A transformative wave the IDC predicts will generate a $22.3 trillion economic impact by 2030. This transformative technology has the far-reaching potential to drive more economic value than the industrial revolution and the rise of the microcomputer.

For the financial services industry in Asia/Pacific, IDC’s own research suggests that the era of the AI pilot project is over. Across the region, GenAI has crossed the threshold of simply being a pilot project or innovation lab side attraction and FSIs are now placing AI initiatives as strategic imperatives on the executive agenda of the board. According to IDC’s 2025 Industry AI and Cloud Path Survey, 74% of financial institutions (FSIs) in the region have already reached the “managed” or “optimized” stages of GenAI adoption. In other words: Banks and insurers in Asia/Pacific aren’t just dabbling in AI anymore. They are now scaling and embedding it across the enterprise.

From Proof of Concept to Profit Centre — But Not Quite Yet 

The first wave of GenAI value creation is landing where it makes the most sense in financial terms: In IT operations (deployed at 55% of FSIs), customer service (51%), and finance functions (47%). Institutions are using AI to chase efficiency goals first by improving quality (32%) and business agility (27%) which head out the list of investment justifications. Revenue growth and margin expansion sit further down as FSIs built out the frameworks for AI now, expecting the harvest of new revenue streams to land after adequate scaling and implementation.  Notably, 33% of FSIs are already deploying GenAI in direct customer interactions with no human involvement and a further 55% are planning to do so within 12 months. For the industry, the AI-powered customer experience is not a future state, it is already knocking at the door.

Resilience: The new operational priority for AI Agents.

External volatility — geopolitical disruption, energy and tariff/FX cost pressure — has made resilience the dominant tech-investment driver in financial services, with FSIs prioritizing cyber-resilience, cloud security, multi-region backup, and supplier diversification over pure efficiency. AI is being recruited into that resilience agenda as a defence and continuity tool rather than just a transformation lever. And it’s not just GenAI – Agentic AI has moved past the adoption question — FSIs already run 29 agent types in production vs. 24 cross-industry and is expected to double by year-end 2026 — shifting the strategic problem from deployment to portfolio management.

Blocking the Path: Governance, Data, and Talent 

Despite the increased momentum, three persistent hurdles are slowing full-scale deployments in FSI enterprises. Governance and risk management top the implementation challenges at 40%. The topic of governance is not just evident from this research but mirrors the tone of the multiple conversations IDC has had with industry leaders across the Asia/Pacific region over the past 12 months where governance issues remain hot conversational and enquiry focuses. Data quality and availability (33%) remain a stubborn legacy problem which has extended from the big data era without being fully resolved. An overall talent crunch rounds out the top three at 30%. A shortage of data scientists and AI modellers that no vendor efforts can fully mitigate. Notably from the research, technology limitations rank low on the worry list. This serves to inform that the bottleneck is not the AI itself, but it is the enterprise readiness to absorb and govern it.

The Next wave: AI Agents, Autonomous Finance, and the Custom-Build Shift 

Today’s goals are driven by efficiency, tomorrows are focused on autonomy. AI agents are the next frontier with 58% of institutions planning agent deployments in finance functions, followed by operations (51%) and customer service (51%). A clear structural shift is also underway in how FSIs build AI capability. Current day reliance and usage on GenAI embedded in existing SaaS platforms is giving way to a growing appetite for custom self-built technology stacks: rising from 16% today to 23% over the next 12 months. FSIs are looking to move from renting AI to owning it fully. The message from Asia Pacific’s financial sector is unambiguous: GenAI is no longer an IT project. It is a competitive weapon and the institutions that treat it as anything less risk being left behind.

Step into the room with industry leaders and experts

At this year’s AFSC 2026, join IDC and a pool of selected technology leaders from across the region to go further in your exploration and understanding of how these shifts in AI will be further impacting your business. Network and learn from peers on the new standards and expectations in the industry and connect with partners who can help you deliver on the capabilities that you are betting on to prepare you for the AI-driven industrial revolution.