Financial services organisations are racing to deploy artificial intelligence, but a widening gap between ambition and operational readiness is undermining their ability to scale, according to the eighth annual Financial Sector Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) report released by Nutanix on 11 June 2026.

The study, conducted in November 2025 by Wakefield Research across 1,600 cloud, IT and engineering executives from organisations with 500 or more employees — including respondents from Singapore, Australia, Japan and Saudi Arabia — finds that 68% of financial institutions acknowledge their infrastructure is not fully equipped to support AI workloads on-premises, while 64% rely on third-party providers to fill the gap.

Shadow AI Is the Immediate Risk

The most acute near-term concern is the proliferation of unsanctioned AI. The report finds that 66% of IT executives in financial services say employees are actively using shadow AI tools, while 86% say this creates significant business risk. Despite widespread awareness, governance and process complexity (38%) and organisational readiness factors including leadership and skills (34%) outweigh technical limitations (28%) as the primary barriers to scaling AI responsibly.

Data sovereignty is adding another layer of tension: 79% of respondents say they prioritise data sovereignty, yet 62% still run containerised workloads in the public cloud — a contradiction the report describes as creating a growing “Sovereignty Debt.”

Singapore Context

The findings carry particular weight in Singapore, where 64% of financial institutions are already actively deploying AI, with a further 35% piloting or researching it — making the Republic one of the most advanced financial AI markets globally. Nutanix notes that local institutions face the same infrastructure and governance pressures, compounded by MAS regulatory requirements around data residency and operational resilience.

“Across APJ, the race is no longer just about who has the most advanced AI models, but who can scale them securely and responsibly. The winners won’t just have the biggest compute budgets — they will be the ones who successfully align their infrastructure with regional compliance and data sovereignty demands.” — Jay Tuseth, Vice President and General Manager, APJ, Nutanix

Containerisation as the Foundation

The report identifies containerisation as an accelerating enabler of AI infrastructure: 90% of respondents say AI is accelerating container adoption, with 89% expecting containerisation to grow. Nutanix positions hybrid multicloud platforms with unified containerised workloads as the architecture best suited to meet both the performance and compliance requirements of AI at scale in financial services.