Arekibo, Ireland's largest independent digital consultancy, has released the first of its new Market Sentiment Series: Digital Strategy trends in Financial Services.

In late April/early May, Arekibo sampled 100 of Ireland's top executives involved in technology and asked them some tough questions about how they perceive themselves and their approach to digital strategy development.

Only 22% have a company-wide digital strategy and almost half (48%) still treat digital in a piece-meal manner. In terms of digital ownership, there has been a shift away from Marketing (29%) owning the strategy, with Senior Management increasingly leading the way at 58%.

Irish Financial firms are becoming more digitally savvy with almost two thirds have some in-house digital capability but still believes that there's room to improve.

Some of the barriers to devising a digital strategy range from creating a coherent business case to stakeholder management and internal skills gaps.

The survey also found that product exploration and experimentation remains relatively low and project-dependent but the industry have aspirations to change this.

Looking to the future of digital in Financial Services, 57% of those surveyed believe that data and its analysis will be the driving force behind their strategic decisions.