The $66 Billion Question: Where Banking IT Spend Really Goes

We recently ran an OrbitShift intelligence scan across 10 of the largest US banking institutions, including JPMorganChase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citi, American Express, Morgan Stanley, Capital One, PNC, and U.S. Bank. Combined, these ten institutions generate roughly $735 billion in annual revenue and represent an estimated ~$66 billion in 2026 IT spend.

Here is what the data reveals about where the real enterprise opportunities lie.

1. Infrastructure is eating the AI budget.

GenAI dominates every earnings call, but in banking the dollars are concentrated in the foundation underneath it. Across the ten accounts, IT infrastructure, data centers, networking, cloud, and core platforms, absorbs almost exactly half of all modeled IT spend, roughly twice the ~25% cross-industry norm. The proof points are large and concrete: JPMorganChase alone runs a $13.1B IT budget, with $6.6B going to infrastructure, while deploying its proprietary LLM Suite across 60% of its workforce. Goldman Sachs is spending $11.4B, with cloud migration and upgraded data infrastructure underpinning its One Goldman Sachs 3.0 AI program. Bank of America is scaling Erica and AI-driven CashPro forecasting on top of a modernized platform stack. The AI headlines are real, but they ride on the cloud, data, and platform substrate the banks are funding first.

2. M&A and restructuring are the real deal triggers, not renewal cycles.

Every one of the ten accounts in the scan is mid-restructuring or mid-integration right now. Citi is running the most dramatic reorganization in the group, collapsing into five divisions, folding U.S. Retail Banking into Wealth Management, separating and preparing an IPO of Banamex, exiting markets including Russia, Korea, and China, and standing up a new general ledger and contract sub-ledger. Capital One is integrating the Discover merger and migrating card volumes onto the Discover network while preparing to absorb Brex. U.S. Bank is integrating its BTIG acquisition, PNC is integrating FirstBank alongside a buildout of more than 300 new branches, and American Express Global Business Travel is integrating CWT after closing that acquisition in 2025. Each of these transitions mandates immediate, high-budget data integration, platform consolidation, and ledger or carve-out work that does not wait for the standard renewal calendar. For services and platform vendors, the strategic window opens at announcement, not at contract expiry.

3. The operational center of gravity is shifting to India.

The budgets sit in the US, but execution is firmly offshore. Nine of the ten accounts already run a Global Capability Center in India, and the scale is enormous:

• JPMorganChase employs roughly 55,000 people across Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Mumbai, and NCR, and is building Asia's largest GCC in Mumbai (Powai), a ~2M sq ft single-occupier campus for up to 30,000 employees, targeted for 2029.
• Citi runs roughly 33,000 people in India, on track to become its second-largest workforce globally, with nearly half in advanced technology, data science, and automation.
• U.S. Bank stood up a new dual-city GCC in March 2026 across Hyderabad and Chennai, with plans to hire 3,000 to 5,000 people over five years.

The pattern extends past the top ten. LPL Financial and Citizens Financial Group both opened Hyderabad GCCs in the last six months. PNC is the lone holdout in this group, which makes it a watch item rather than a counterexample. To win multi-million-dollar deals in 2026, enterprise sales teams can no longer single-thread the US buying committee. The shadow buying committee sitting inside the Indian GCC is increasingly the one shaping platform decisions, vendor evaluations, and delivery models. Account plans that don't map both sides of the ocean will lose to plans that do.