Australian banks are likely to increase spending on information technology by just two per cent this year, considerably less than their peers in Asia-Pacific, where a 5.1 per cent boost in IT investment is expected in 2013.The apparent shortfall, however, does not point to local banks abandoning technology - rather it reflects the differing stages of maturity among regional banks. Australian banks, for example, are starting to wind back investment in big ticket technology refresh programs, after getting a head-start over many of their regional peers, but they are still investing in customer-facing innovation. Meanwhile, other regional banks, particularly in China, are still spending very heavily on costly IT infrastructure.A global report, released by technology analyst Ovum, forecasts that overall IT spending by retail banks will rise 3.4 per cent across the world, reaching $US118 billion in 2013. Ovum did not forecast exactly how much of that would be spent by local banks.According to Denise Montgomery, financial service industry research director for Ovum in the Asia-Pacific region, the top spending priorities for local banks are technologies to support mobile banking and online channels, and an increasing demand for so-called big data deployments, which allow customer information to be analysed at a very granular level in order to hone marketing and product initiatives to meet individual needs.She said that a survey of the Australian banks, conducted at the end of 2012, about their IT investment intentions for 2013 revealed that there would likely be a decrease in pure IT infrastructure spending, as many of the banks had finished their major technology refreshes, and, in some cases, had edged towards the completion of their expensive core banking system overhauls.Certainly that reduction in spending on the back-end of IT is the case at Commonwealth Bank, which has now completed its A$1.1 billion core systems overhaul. The bank, however, continues to invest heavily in customer-facing technology and will today unveil its latest technical innovation for customers, which, it claims, "is set to revolutionise the way Australians create and manage their own financial future."Ovum claims that the focus of the banks on customer-facing innovation is gathering pace across the region. It claims there is an "optimistic shift" among Asia-Pacific banks, which are now prepared to invest in technologies aimed at improving customer satisfaction, growing revenues and fuelling cross-selling, rather than just looking for ways to use technology to strip costs out of the business.Montgomery said that this shift in spending focus heralded the fact that increasingly "chief marketing officers are controlling and will control more of the IT spending in the future."