Nutanix announced the findings of its eighth annual Financial Sector Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) report. The findings reveal that while financial services organisations are rapidly adopting AI, many are struggling to scale effectively as governance, infrastructure and operational readiness lag behind.
Key findings:
- Shadow AI is widespread and poses a significant risk: 66% of IT executives report employees using unsanctioned AI, while 86% say it creates business risk.
- Governance and process are the biggest barriers: Process complexity (38%) and organisational factors, including leadership and skills (34%), outweigh technical limitations (28%) when scaling AI.
- Data sovereignty is creating growing tension: While 79% prioritise data sovereignty, 62% still run containerised workloads in the public cloud, creating a growing “Sovereignty Debt”
- Containerisation is accelerating as a foundation for AI: 90% say AI is accelerating container adoption, with 89% expecting containerisation to grow.
The findings point to an inflection for the financial services industry, as organisations race to scale AI amid increasing regulatory and operational pressures.
As organisations push forward with deployment, 68% acknowledge that their infrastructure is not fully equipped to support AI workloads on-premises, while nearly two-thirds (64%) rely on third-party providers to bridge that gap. To move from adoption to scale, organisations will need to better align infrastructure, governance, and operational processes to ensure AI can be deployed securely and compliantly.
“Across the Middle East and Africa, financial institutions are moving beyond AI experimentation and increasingly embedding AI into core business operations – from customer engagement and risk management to fraud detection and regulatory compliance. However, as adoption accelerates, many organisations are discovering that scaling AI successfully requires more than access to models and data. The findings highlight a growing need for modern infrastructure, stronger governance frameworks, and greater operational readiness to ensure AI can be deployed securely, compliantly, and at scale. As regulatory expectations around data sovereignty continue to evolve across the region, financial services organisations must strike the right balance between innovation, control, and resilience to unlock the full value of AI, ” said Mohammad Abulhouf, VP & GM, Middle East & Africa at Nutanix.
