Key Takeaways
- Financial institutions in EMEA are facing increasing competition, rising customer expectations, and complex regulatory requirements.
- Technological innovation, particularly AI, is crucial for driving business outcomes, but demands careful execution.
- Cloud migration, regulatory compliance, and technical debt are significant challenges for EMEA financial institutions.
- Agentic AI has the potential to revolutionize operational efficiency and decision-making in financial services.
- AWS provides secure, scalable infrastructure and advanced services to support EMEA financial institutions in their technological transformation.
Introduction to the Challenges Facing EMEA Financial Institutions
Financial institutions across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) are confronting a defining moment. The industry is experiencing intensifying competition, rising customer expectations, and increasingly complex regulatory requirements. The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and data sovereignty mandates are just a few examples of the regulatory hurdles that financial institutions must navigate. Furthermore, technological innovation, fueled by artificial intelligence (AI), is evolving at a rapid pace, making it essential for financial institutions to adopt and execute technology strategies carefully. To provide EMEA financial institutions with actionable intelligence, AWS commissioned Celent’s "Delivering Agility: FSI Technology Priorities in 2025/26" report, which reveals how institutions are adapting to rapid change and accelerating digital transformation.
The Acceleration of AI Adoption
The report highlights that AI and advanced analytics have emerged as the top technology investment priority across all financial services segments in EMEA. In retail banking, 45% of institutions identified this as a key focus area, while European buy-side firms showed similar prioritization at 46%. The shift from AI experimentation to production deployment is accelerating rapidly, with 67% of banks planning to launch customer-facing generative AI services in 2026. To optimize the impact of this powerful technology, the ability to scale production will be key. AWS enables financial institutions to implement and scale AI rapidly, securely, and cost-effectively, delivering a proven advantage in competitive markets.
The Migration of Business-Critical Workloads to the Cloud
Cloud migration remains a cornerstone of modernization efforts, with 56% of banks expecting to move more workloads to public cloud infrastructure and 58% planning to move business-critical workloads to the cloud. The migration of core systems to the cloud is enabling both operational resilience and innovation in EMEA financial institutions. However, regulatory requirements and data sovereignty mandates remain persistent challenges. AWS provides the most advanced set of sovereignty controls and features available in the cloud today, including the AWS Digital Sovereignty Pledge and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, which meets the most stringent EU-specific regulatory requirements.
The Tension Between Regulatory Compliance and Innovation
Firms are allocating substantial portions of their technology budgets to fulfill regulatory requirements, with 18% of IT spending dedicated to mandatory changes. The tension between regulatory compliance and innovation presents a strategic challenge for EMEA financial institutions. Those that can efficiently address compliance needs while continuing to invest in growth-oriented initiatives will secure a definitive competitive advantage. AWS enables financial institutions to deploy AI at scale while maintaining regulatory compliance through purpose-built infrastructure, ensuring data residency requirements are met and automating threat detection and compliance documentation.
The Impact of Technical Debt on Agility and Competitive Differentiation
The burden of technical debt continues to be a significant barrier to innovation across EMEA, with approximately 37% of banks citing limitations of existing technologies as a major constraint to delivering product enhancements. Financial institutions that prioritize legacy system modernization will be better positioned to enhance customer experiences, improve operational efficiency, and respond to competitive threats. AWS offers financial institutions multiple modernization pathways, from lift-and-shift migrations to full application refactoring, and provides specialized tools, guidance, and financial incentives to accelerate legacy modernization while managing risk.
The Potential of Agentic AI in Financial Services
Agentic AI has the potential to revolutionize operational efficiency and decision-making in financial services, transforming straight-through processing in capital markets, underwriting in insurance, and creating entirely new customer service paradigms in banking. However, the development of robust governance frameworks is crucial to ensure the safe and effective deployment of agentic AI. AWS infrastructure enables reliable, secure AI agents at scale, and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore enables financial institutions to build, deploy, and manage autonomous AI agents across complex financial workflows.
Building Agility for the Future
The Celent report provides important insights into how EMEA financial institutions are navigating technological transformation. In 2026, the organizations that will thrive are those that balance operational resilience with customer-centric innovation, leverage the power of AI, and accelerate modernization of their technology foundations. At AWS, the focus is on supporting EMEA financial institutions on this journey, providing the secure, scalable infrastructure and advanced services needed to deliver the agility that will define success in the years ahead. By taking the next step and leveraging the insights and solutions provided by AWS, financial institutions can position themselves for success in a rapidly changing industry.
