Financial services will outspend most U.S. industries in 2026, and H1 B2B tech buying shows where the contracts are moving

U.S. financial services firms are on pace to put nearly half a trillion dollars a year into technology in 2026, and the mix matters. Forrester forecasts U.S. financial services tech budgets, including staff costs, will reach $495 billion in 2026, up from $449 billion in 2025, a 10.3% year-over-year increase. In the same research, Forrester pegs total U.S. tech spending across industries at $2.9 trillion in 2026, putting financial services at 17.1% of the total.

Meanwhile, enterprise buying is already landing in the channel. Circana-tracked U.S. B2B tech spending reached $35.3 billion in the first half of 2026, according to ProInsights360’s reporting on a Circana forecast. It is a different lens than Forrester’s category-level budget view, but it provides a concrete midyear checkpoint for procurement teams trying to separate “intent” from booked spend.

Where the 2026 dollars are going: efficiency plus AI foundations

Forrester frames 2026 financial services priorities around operational efficiency and AI foundations, with a heavy dose of risk management. The report points to investment in AI-powered interfaces such as virtual agents that can both retrieve information and execute tasks, and it also calls out agentic AI aimed at streamlining processes, modernizing legacy systems, and improving risk management (Forrester).

That emphasis has a specific operational implication for CIOs and ops leaders inside banks and insurers: the “AI line item” increasingly lives across multiple cost centers. Model access, infrastructure, security controls, monitoring, and workflow redesign tend to show up in different contracts and different approval paths. Forrester also highlights governance themes, including observability, explainability, and behavioral consistency with guardrails to reduce bias and unpredictable behavior in regulated environments. That language is a tell, it points to spend on instrumentation, policy, and testing that procurement teams can actually specify and enforce.

Forrester’s report also cites examples of large-scale AI investment and usage in the sector. It references JPMorganChase’s publicly discussed $2 billion AI investment and broader employee adoption of generative AI tools in daily work, citing external sources linked within the report (Forrester). Even for organizations far smaller than a top-tier bank, this sets an expectation suppliers will increasingly treat AI features as standard table stakes in financial services RFPs.

What H1 B2B tech spending suggests about contracting and timing

The Circana number, $35.3 billion in U.S. B2B tech spending in H1 2026, as reported by ProInsights360, is best read as a cycle-timing signal. It indicates that buyers are still signing, even as AI consumption pricing and security requirements complicate forecasts. For operators, the useful move is to translate that run-rate into internal calendar pressure: more vendors will try to pull renewals forward, and more projects will get packaged as “foundation work” to qualify for budget.

The procurement wrinkle is that “foundation” can mean very different things depending on the vendor and the architecture. In financial services, Forrester’s focus on guardrails and observability implies a growing share of spend will be attached to controls that need to operate continuously, not once at go-live. That tends to favor contract structures with measurable service levels for monitoring coverage, audit evidence retention, and incident response, not only feature entitlements.

How to use these benchmarks in 2026 planning cycles

For financial services leaders, Forrester’s 10.3% growth forecast is a reminder that budgets are expanding, but scrutiny is sharpening around efficiency and compliance outcomes. For non-financial enterprises that sell into banks, insurers, and capital markets firms, the $495 billion figure is a demand signal: sector requirements around explainability, consistency, and monitoring are likely to become default deal terms that spill into adjacent regulated industries.

The two figures also help IT finance teams set a more realistic narrative with internal stakeholders. A midyear B2B spend checkpoint from Circana, alongside a sector forecast from Forrester, can be used to calibrate whether a portfolio is underinvesting in controls relative to its ambition in AI-enabled workflows. For organizations with significant legacy modernization programs, Forrester’s framing of agentic AI as a process and legacy-systems lever suggests the most fundable proposals will tie automation to measurable cycle-time reduction and risk-management improvements, rather than model novelty.

Questions for procurement and IT ops teams ahead of renewals

• For AI-related contracts coming up for renewal, which line items explicitly cover observability, explainability support, and guardrail enforcement, and which are implicitly assumed? Forrester’s 2026 priorities suggest auditors and risk teams will ask for explicit coverage.
• If a vendor pitches an “AI foundation” package, what portion is recurring operating cost (monitoring, policy updates, evaluation) versus one-time implementation? Use the H1 2026 spend pace reported by ProInsights360 (via Circana) as a reminder that vendors are trying to lock in recurring run-rate.
• For financial services firms budgeting toward Forrester’s $495B 2026 forecast, which initiatives are designed to improve efficiency in measurable terms, and what is the metric in the SOW: cycle time, error rate, fraud loss, or manual review volume?