$1.8 Million Per Hour: New Relic Report Details the Staggering Cost of High-Impact IT Outages for Financial Services Companies

IT and engineering leaders in this sector practice cautious innovation, with security, governance, risk, and compliance the primary driver of observability adoption, followed by AI adoption

Half of financial services companies now use AI monitoring, a 6 point increase year-over-year but slightly below the cross-industry average

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--New Relic, the Intelligent Observability company, today published its Observability Forecast for Financial Services, which uncovers how the industry is adopting observability in response to frequent IT outages, increasing enterprise AI usage, and regulatory, security, modernization, and competitive pressures. Drawing insights from 156 IT and engineering leaders at financial services companies—including banks, financial technology, insurance companies, investment firms, and credit unions—the report is based on data from New Relic’s 2025 Observability Forecast.

The innovation tax: Frequent downtime erodes revenue and productivity

Financial services companies report that high business impact outages cost $1.8 million per hour on average, in line with the cross-industry average of $1.7 million per hour. Outages are also frequent in this industry, with 29% of respondents reporting high business impact outages at least weekly, only slightly lower than the all-industry average of 35%. Network failures are the most common culprit of outages (37%), followed by software deployment issues (34%) and changes made to the environment (32%). Beyond the financial drain, engineering teams spend on average 31% of their time addressing disruptions—taking their attention away from business innovation.

Modernization with caution: AI, security and compliance require observability

While financial services companies are not traditionally first movers on new technology adoption, the data shows they are starting to leverage AI, which is driving observability adoption. AI monitoring deployment in this industry stands at 50%, just a few points shy of the cross-industry average of 54% using the capability. Thirty-eight percent of financial services organizations cite AI as a primary driver for observability adoption, the second most cited driver after security, governance, risk, and compliance. Nearly half of respondents (47%) said observability helps their organization prepare for and manage AI application development and AI deployment.

Banking on trust: Financial services companies prioritize flawless digital experiences

Thirty-three percent of industry respondents, 8 points above the cross-industry average, say increasing demands on improving customer experiences make robust observability a priority. Recognizing the link between customer loyalty, seamless mobile banking performance and digital interactions, financial services companies are prioritizing digital experience monitoring (DEM) in future plans. In the next one to three years, 89% of respondents plan to deploy browser monitoring, 80% plan to deploy mobile monitoring, and 77% plan to deploy synthetic monitoring.

“In an era where downtime is measured in millions, financial institutions can no longer afford to fly blind. The shift from experimental AI to production-grade intelligence requires a new level of operational rigor,” said New Relic Chief Technical Strategist Nic Benders. “Our latest data confirms that observability is a strategy to de-risk the sector’s modernization efforts. It provides the guardrails necessary to deliver seamless digital experiences and scale AI responsibly, ensuring that progress never comes at the expense of security or compliance.”

Other key findings include:

• Observability is delivering business value. Forty-two percent of financial services companies report an ROI of 2x or more from their observability investments. Respondents also cited the business outcomes achieved with the technology. More than half say observability improves collaboration across teams for making software stack decisions (56%) and mitigates service disruptions and business risk (53%)—ultimately helping shift developer time from reactive incident response towards higher-value work.
• Financial services companies lead the way in observability for DevOps. The report found that 66% are using observability to optimize continuous software delivery pipelines and improve code quality—well above the cross-industry average of 55%. Additionally, 59% have automated their infrastructure provisioning and orchestration (compared to 49% cross-industry), while 53% have automated portions of their incident response (versus 41% cross-industry).
• Observability priorities mirror industry mandates around security and reliability. Examining which observability capabilities financial services companies most lean on, the industry leads the market in the deployment of network and security monitoring (72%), outpacing global benchmarks by double digits. Stronger-than-average adoption of database monitoring (69%) and log management (61%) further reinforces the sector’s commitment to a high-uptime, highly secure digital environment.

The Observability Forecast for Financial Services is available today. Read the full report.

About New Relic

The New Relic Intelligent Observability Platform helps businesses eliminate interruptions in digital experiences. New Relic is the only AI-strengthened platform to unify and pair telemetry data to provide clarity over your entire digital estate. We move your problem solving past proactive to predictive by processing the right data at the right time to maximize value and control costs. That’s why businesses around the world—including Adidas Runtastic, Domino’s, GoTo Group, Ryanair, Swiggy, Topgolf, and William Hill—run on New Relic to drive innovation, improve reliability, and deliver exceptional customer experiences to fuel growth.