It’s all in the name: Real Results. IDC’s annual FinTech Rankings and Real Results program doesn’t hand out recognition for a slide of names. It looks for technology providers that made a measurable difference at real financial institutions, and this year’s winners are now live, marking the 24th year of the Rankings and the 14th year of Real Results.
We sat down with Jerry Silva, Program Vice President at IDC Financial Insights, to talk through what these programs measure, what changed in this year’s submissions, and where the money is moving next.
What is the IDC FinTech Rankings program?
The Rankings started as a straightforward ask from IDC’s institutional clients: banks, capital markets firms, and insurance carriers who wanted a clear picture of the technology landscape serving their industry. “They really wanted from us kind of what the landscape looked like in terms of technology providers,” Silva says
IDC evaluates and categorizes technology providers by prior-year revenue from financial institutions across hardware, software, and services. Two lists come out of that work. The Top 100 covers firms that specialize in financial services: more than a third of their revenue comes from the industry, and they don’t spread across more than two other verticals. The Enterprise Top 50 covers larger, broader technology firms, think Microsoft, IBM, Dell, that generate meaningful financial-services revenue without being narrowly focused on the industry.
What separates the Top 10 from the rest of the list
Making either list depends on revenue. Where a company lands within it depends on something else. Silva points to product and capability range as the real differentiator between the Top 10 and everyone below it. Companies further down tend to specialize in one function, like payments or fraud, while the leaders cover core banking, payments, risk and compliance, customer experience, and data and analytics all at once. “Those companies at the top of the list tend to be incredibly broad,” he says.
How Real Results complement the rankings
Rankings measures size and reach. Real Results measures something else entirely: whether the technology actually worked. The program was Silva’s addition, and it came from a specific frustration. After decades on the institution side of the industry, he’d grown tired of innovation awards that never tied back to a measurable outcome. “I kept seeing all these innovation awards out there that never really focused on what was the benefit,” he says. “It was always about, well, this will enable the client to do X, Y, Z in the future. Well, that doesn’t help me.”
So Real Results asks technology providers to submit case studies: real projects, at a named institution, with a verified metric attached. IDC contacts someone at the institution directly to confirm the numbers. Fourteen years later, the program covers seven categories: infrastructure modernization, omni-experience customer engagement, treasury and trade, payments, capital markets, insurance transformation, and digital trust and stewardship.
The bar is strict. “If a submission doesn’t have those numbers, doesn’t have quantifiable, measurable benefits, I disqualify it,” Silva says. Projections about future value don’t qualify. IDC only considers results that have already happened..
The biggest shift in this year’s case studies: AI, everywhere
That bar produced a clear pattern in this year’s submissions. Historically, no single technology dominated Real Results entries. The closest IDC came to a unifying trend was the cloud migration wave of 2018-2019. That’s changed. For the past two years, AI has driven nearly every entry, and this year’s winners went further than a single AI tool.
“Most of the winners, all except maybe one, used a combination,” Silva says: traditional machine learning, generative AI for content creation, and agentic AI to orchestrate the whole process, often in the same project.
The overall winner illustrates it well. A large bank had a legacy process scattered across multiple systems, and instead of stitching those systems together point to point, the technology provider used machine learning and generative AI to create usable data out of the legacy sources, with AI agents orchestrating the process end to end. The result was fewer errors and lower costs, with a process that used to take days now finishing in hours.
Where financial services technology spending is headed next
That same AI-everywhere pattern shows up in where the market is headed next, though not in the part of the business most people assume. Over the past six to nine months, investment has shifted away from front-office, customer-experience projects and toward the back office: modernizing databases, finance platforms, and HR systems.
Two forces are driving it. Most institutions don’t have their data in a state that’s ready for AI to run against multiple sources at once, so they’re investing to fix that first. And once an AI platform is in place, institutions want a more open, API-driven back office instead of stitching new tools to legacy systems one connection at a time.
The scale of that investment is notable on its own. IDC’s newest forecast puts financial services technology spending, hardware, software, and services combined, at more than a trillion dollars a year globally by 2030, growing around 12% annually. “I think you’ll see a huge shift to the back office until they start solving some of those problems,” Silva says.
Where to see the full 2026 IDC FinTech Rankings winners
The full 2026 IDC FinTech Rankings and Real Results winners are live now. Twenty-four years in, institutional clients still use the list the same way they did at the start: as a shortlist. As Silva puts it, when institutions are evaluating a project, “the list actually helps them narrow down that short list.”
