The Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) sector continues to lead other sectors in IT spend and will spend around $2.5 billion in 2008 as per Skoch Consultancy Services. The new projections reflect a growth rate of 18.5 percent when compared to last year’s figures of $2.1 billion.

CEOs of top 30 banks and insurance firms participated in the survey and pointed out the main concerns surrounding BFSI are related to CRM, more fee-based income and cross-selling of financial products with about 42 percent CEOs saying that an integrated last-mile delivery channel for all financial products was very important. The companies look forward to enhancing IT infrastructure in areas like CRM, Human Resources Management (HRM), Business Intelligence and data mining kind of applications and services.

“One of the reasons for higher growth rate in applications like CRM, HRM, Business Intelligence and Data Mining is that they are now considered critical for cross selling, avoiding customer churn and differentiating brand and product offerings and knowing your customer better,” said Sameer Kochhar, CEO of Skoch Consultancy Services.

Among spending trends, the survey highlights that mobile services are all set to assume significant role in future business plans of BFSI companies. Mobile payments and voice-enabled mobile handsets, to offer range of financial services are set to be introduced on a large scale in the next three years.