New Relic, the intelligent observability platform, has released its 2026 Observability Forecast for Financial Services, analyzing the state of observability within the sector. 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, meaning nearly one in five industry companies with live agents have no view into their actions.
New Relic released its 2026 Observability Forecast for Financial Services, drawing from 278 financial services IT and engineering leaders within a global study of 2,575 respondents.
22% of financial companies have deployed AI agents in production with zero monitoring.
The report calls the resulting blind spot "phantom velocity": productivity gains from AI quietly cancelled out by downtime and emergency fixes.
42% of financial services companies currently monitor AI applications versus 47% globally, and 38% monitor agentic systems versus 44% globally.
Factoring in plans for the next 12 months, the AI monitoring adoption rate for financial services is projected to reach 83%, ahead of the global 12-month trajectory of 80%.
Financial services companies detect outages in 35 minutes versus 41 globally and resolve them in 49 minutes versus 54 globally.
"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."
Given the sector's strict regulatory exposure, such as the Digital Operational Resilience Act 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.
Financial services trails the broader market on current AI observability deployment. 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. 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%.
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.
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.
New Relic, in partnership with Enterprise Technology Research, 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.
About New Relic
New Relic arms businesses with the trust and confidence required to thrive in the AI era. The New Relic Intelligent Observability Platform is the leading AI-strengthened platform designed to unify telemetry and business outcomes, bringing intelligence and automated actions to the most complex digital environments. The platform shifts teams from reactive firefighting to intelligent orchestration, leveraging AI-driven automation to optimize technology spend and protect revenue in real-time. That's why global leaders—Adidas Runtastic, Domino's, Ryanair, Swiggy, Topgolf, and William Hill—run on New Relic to drive innovation and deliver exceptional customer experiences.
