I have been doing a survey on what organizations are doing with SharePoint. There were three questions, the second of which was an industry classification. For some industries, I received enough responses to give an industry breakdown.

Here is the chart for Financial Services (24 responses):

In comparison to the Overall results:

• For financial services, the two top uses of SharePoint are “Publishing Intranet content” and “Enabling workflow processes.” This is very different from the Overall results, where “Supporting team collaboration” is number 1, and “Publishing Intranet content” is number 2. For financial services, supporting team collaboration is the third usage area.
• Use of SharePoint to enable workflow was significantly more important within financial services compared to the Overall results. Overall use today was about 50-something percent, and for financial services it was 75%. That’s a big difference. The Overall respondent base expects to be at 80-something percent in 12 months, so perhaps financial services is the bellweather for this. “What financial services does with workflow, the rest of the world will do in 12 months,” or something like that.
• “Encouraging social collaboration” is pretty similar in current state and 12 month state, but financial services organizations are more than twice as likely to say they will “never” use SharePoint for social collaboration than the Overall base. This could be due to the greater need for ethical walls, or greater conservatism.
• “Providing business intelligence and insight” and “Powering enterprise search” are the two large growth areas for SharePoint over the next 12 months within financial services organizations. This signals a coming sea change in tooling for financial services, as earlier generation tools give way to SharePoint’s platform capabilities.

You can see the Overall Analysis based on 239 responses.