New Relic Report Finds Compliance and AI Governance Drive Observability Demand in Financial Services

22% of financial services companies run AI agents in production without monitoring, creating significant compliance and operational exposure

For high-impact IT outages, the industry has lower costs, and faster detection and resolution times than the global average, reflecting strong operational discipline

New Relic, the intelligent observability platform, today released its 2026 Observability Forecast for Financial Services, analyzing the state of observability within the sector. Drawing from 278 financial services IT and engineering leaders and practitioners within a global study of 2,575 respondents, the report reveals that while compliance remains the foremost driver of observability adoption, 22% of financial companies have deployed AI agents in production with zero monitoring. This means that nearly one in five industry companies with live agents have no view into their actions. That blind spot exposes organizations to what the report calls "phantom velocity:" productivity gains from AI that are quietly cancelled out by the downtime and emergency fixes those same systems create.

Given the sector's strict regulatory exposure, such as the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) taking full effect earlier this year, unmonitored agents are the single highest-risk finding in the report. An unmonitored agent that moves money or changes a configuration is a compliance failure waiting to be discovered.

Bridging the AI governance gap: Financial institutions are set to outpace global observability adoption

Financial services trails the broader market on current AI observability deployment. Forty-two percent of companies in the industry currently monitor AI applications (versus 47% globally) and 38% monitor agentic systems (versus 44% globally). However, near-term plans close nearly all of that gap, and a strong majority (78%) of financial services leaders agree that AI-generated code makes reliable observability more critical. When factoring in plans for the next 12 months, the AI monitoring adoption rate for financial services is projected to reach 83%, which would place the sector ahead of the global 12-month trajectory of 80%. For agentic AI monitoring, the adoption rate for financial services is projected to reach 75%, which would place the industry close to the global 12-month trajectory of 77%.

Faster detection, shorter downtime: Financial services sets the benchmark for incident containment

Industry compliance mandates are translating into operational discipline. The sector leads the cross-industry average in automation practices like CI/CD (70%) and automated incident response (51%). Additionally, financial services organizations experience high-impact IT outages weekly or more often at a lower rate than the broader market (30% vs. 36%). When outages do occur, they are detected and resolved faster by financial services companies than the cross-industry average: 35 minutes to detect (vs. 41 globally) and 49 minutes to resolve (vs. 54 globally). The industry also beats the global average cost of high-impact IT outages, losing a mean cost of $1.69 million per hour versus $1.85 million per hour globally.

Compliance is the single biggest driver of observability demand, but AI is a close second

When asked about factors pushing their need for observability, financial services respondents ranked security, governance, risk, and compliance the highest. AI applications were selected second most often, followed closely by agentic AI systems. This flips the global respondents order, where AI applications lead, reflecting the financial services industry's regulatory-first posture.

"In a highly regulated industry like financial services, innovation cannot outpace governance," said Nic Benders, Chief Technical Strategist at New Relic. "The data shows that while financial institutions are taking a cautious approach to deploying AI-native tooling, the race is on. To maintain their strong operational discipline and avoid unseen compliance failures, these organizations must close the visibility gap and instrument their AI agents before they ship. You simply cannot deploy AI responsibly without observing it."

Report Methodology

New Relic, in partnership with Enterprise Technology Research (ETR), produced this industry analysis of the State of Observability 2026. This report analyzes responses from 278 IT and engineering leaders and practitioners in Financial Services, drawn from this year's global study of 2,575 respondents.

Learn more

The 2026 Observability Forecast for Financial Services is available today. Read the full report.

Visit New Relic at Money20/20, booth #21102.