Macquarie’s banking and financial services (BFS) operational business saw an 18 percent increase in technology spending year over year, owing to its continuous digital initiatives.
BFS had “technology expenses of $464 million for the year ended March 31 2022,” up from “$394 million the prior year, driven by investment in digitalisation to support company growth and regulatory needs,” according to its FY22 figures [pdf].
Technology expenses in BFS increased from $214 million to $250 million between the first and second half of FY22.
According to footnotes in the financial filing, technology expenses include employee costs, depreciation of technological assets, amortisation of capitalised software, and maintenance costs.
Macquarie Group oversees Macquarie Bank as well as the non-banking group business, which includes Macquarie Asset Management (MAM) and Macquarie Capital.
All are backed by central service group functions, one of which – the corporate operations group, or COG – also contains some IT spend in areas such as technology, data and transformation, and security support, each with its own expenses and spend.
In the medium term, Macquarie Group predicted that groupwide technology spending would be “ongoing,” however it did not specify how much.
Regulatory and compliance were contributors to technology spend across the board; “a variety of technology initiatives” contributed to a 31 percent increase in regulatory project spend year over year.
At least two of the initiatives were data-related, according to a breakdown of the projects [pdf], one of which saw spending climb from $20 million in FY21 to $35 million in FY22.
Macquarie Group’s net profit for FY22 was $4.7 billion, up 56 percent year on year.