IDC Spotlight Paper on AI Modernization in Banking: Why Visibility, Governance, and Resilience Matter

Banks are moving quickly to understand where AI can create value. The critical priority is ensuring modernization can support that value without increasing risk. The challenge isn’t whether AI matters. It’s determining how to scale it inside a business where resilience failures, governance gaps, and security missteps can carry immediate (and hefty) operational and regulatory consequences.

IDC Spotlight paper sponsored by Rocket Software, How Does a Bank Transform Itself with AI Without Disrupting the Business?, provides a clear view of what responsible AI modernization requires in banking. Its central point is straightforward: banks that succeed with AI won’t simply modernize faster. They’ll modernize with the governance, resilience, and control needed to protect critical operations while creating room for innovation.

The IDC paper makes the modernization challenge clear. Most banks operate across infrastructures shaped by years of technology decisions, which can make AI adoption across traditional analytics, generative models, and emerging agentic use cases more complex.

The scale of investment reflects the urgency: IDC estimates banking infrastructure investment will grow by $33.6 billion in 2026 and rise at a 14.7% CAGR through 2029, outpacing overall IT spend growth.
 

Hybrid as a modernization strategy

IDC’s analysis makes a critical point: Modernization itself can become the risk if it’s approached as a wholesale replacement exercise or pursued outside the disciplines of governance, compliance, resilience, and security. That’s why the paper’s emphasis on fit-for-purpose modernization matters. Public cloud may be right for some workloads, but not all. The paper makes the case that hybrid deserves to be treated as a strategy, not simply a fallback.

The IDC Spotlight paper highlights several disciplines that separate serious modernization from reactive transformation—especially around governance, ROI, and execution readiness. These disciplines are essential executive priorities for banks to modernize with control.

For banking leaders, the implication is clear: AI strategy is now inseparable from modernization strategy. And modernization strategy can’t be separated from governance, resilience, and risk. 

Consider the loan origination process. A bank can use AI to accelerate document review, surface risk signals, and help route decisions faster across teams and systems. But in a regulated environment, speed only creates value if the process is built on trusted data, clear lineage, governed access, and resilient execution across core platforms and cloud services. That’s what responsible modernization looks like: giving teams the visibility, control, and confidence to apply AI in ways that are secure, auditable, and aligned to the operational realities of banking.

Why partner choice is strategic

The paper also touches on the role of partners in helping banks modernize in complex, regulated, hybrid environments. The IDC Spotlight paper notes that few banks can staff thousands of IT workers to continuously develop and implement new technologies such as AI. That makes partner selection strategic—not just for execution capacity, but for domain credibility and the ability to align modernization to a governance environment.

The IDC Spotlight paper positions Rocket as relevant to banks seeking to modernize legacy mainframe systems, enhance operational resilience, and enable transformation across hybrid IT architectures.. More broadly, the paper suggests that partner choice in banking modernization should be evaluated not only for execution capacity, but also for governance fit, credibility, and complexity reduction.