One of the most persistent blind spots in financial services leadership is the gap between what the technology function costs and what the rest of the executive team understands about why.
Technology now underpins almost every revenue-generating and risk-controlling function in financial services, non-technical C-suite executives cannot afford to treat tech spend as something that only the CTO or CIO needs to understand. The board-level conversation about technology has to move beyond approval of line items and into genuine strategic oversight.
The starting point is categorisation. Asking the technology team to break down spending into clear buckets, software licensing, hardware, cloud infrastructure, and personnel, is not a sign of distrust. It is the minimum required to understand where capital is going and why. According to Deloitte, financial services firms typically spend between 6 and 8 percent of revenue on IT. Knowing where your firm sits relative to that benchmark, and whether deviation in either direction is intentional, is basic executive literacy.
Beyond categorisation, the key discipline is connecting tech investment to business outcomes. Cost savings, revenue growth, risk reduction, regulatory compliance, and cybersecurity improvements are all measurable consequences of technology decisions. If the technology function cannot articulate how each significant investment maps to one of those outcomes, that is a governance failure as much as a communication one. The question to ask in every review is not what was built, but what changed as a result.
Real-time dashboards, used well, are a legitimate tool for non-technical leaders. Tools like Power BI and Tableau can surface the metrics that matter at board level: IT spend as a percentage of revenue, budget variance, project timeliness, and system uptime. The discipline is in ensuring dashboards show only what is decision-relevant, not everything that can be measured. Dashboards that require technical fluency to interpret serve the technology function, not the board.
Regular structured reviews with CTO and CIO counterparts, held at least quarterly, are equally important. The goal of those reviews is to translate technology decisions into business language: what does this project deliver for the customer, what is the risk of not investing, and how does the spend compare to what competitors are doing? Opportunity cost matters as much as direct cost in these conversations.
External audits provide the independent perspective that internal reporting often cannot. Engaging independent auditors or consultants to assess IT spend and efficiency periodically is not an admission of weakness. It is the same discipline that boards apply to financial audits, and the technology function deserves the same level of scrutiny.
The McKinsey analysis is useful here: technology value creation in financial services increasingly requires the whole C-suite to be engaged, not just the technology leadership. That engagement does not require technical expertise. It requires the right questions, the right metrics, and the discipline to hold the conversation at the right level of abstraction.