$1.8 million per hour: New Relic report highlights the staggering cost of high-impact IT outages
New Relic, 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.
Modernisation 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 organisations 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 organisation prepare for and manage AI application development and AI deployment.
Banking on trust: Financial services companies prioritise 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. Recognising 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.
“Across the Asia Pacific, financial services organisations are operating in one of the most tightly regulated and digitally demanding environments in the world,” said Rob Newell, SVP & GM APJ New Relic. From real-time payments to always-on mobile banking, customers expect flawless performance—and regulators expect resilience. Our data shows that observability has become critical for financial institutions in the region, helping them reduce the impact of outages, modernise with confidence, and adopt AI responsibly. In 2026, it’s no longer just a technical capability; it’s a business imperative for protecting trust while enabling innovation at scale.”
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.