January 2026: The Market Pivots from Experiments to Execution
The intelligent document processing market entered 2026 with a decisive shift in customer expectations. "The age of AI experimentation is over," declared Coforge CEO Sudhir Singh during the company's post-earnings call. "Customers are demanding proof of business impact, measurable KPI improvements and clear paths to operational transformation" (Times of India).
This sentiment reverberates across the industry as enterprises abandon pilot programs for production-scale deployments with clear ROI metrics.
Welcome New Vendors
We welcome the following new vendors to the IDP Software directory this month: Caya, FutureVault, Hyarchis, inovoo, LumoDoc, myBiros, Ondox, Pulse, ScaleHub, SAP Document AI, and Scry AI.
The M&A Wave Accelerates
Consolidation defined January's deal-making. Coforge completed its $2.4 billion acquisition of Encora—India's largest IT deal—creating a combined entity with $2.5 billion in revenue, nearly $2 billion from AI-led engineering and cloud services (Mint).
Aptean acquired OpsVeda to bring "Agentic AI orchestration" to its Logility supply chain platform. "By aggregating data from enterprise systems and LLMs in real time to drive intelligent actions, OpsVeda sets a new standard," said EVP Allan Dow (Globe Newswire).
HCLTech acquired Singapore-based Finergic for $14.88 million to strengthen wealth management consulting capabilities, while Box released Box Extract—its AI metadata agent built on technology acquired from Alphamoon in 2024 (TechTarget).
Activist investors are circling. Fivespan Partners took a 6.2% stake in Appian, whose stock has declined 86% over five years despite inclusion in market research reports projecting the BFSI RPA market to reach $6.26 billion by 2031 (Channel News Asia).
Banking Drives Growth
Financial services emerged as the bright spot. The BFSI RPA market is projected to grow from $1.17 billion to $6.26 billion by 2031 at a 32.14% CAGR (Globe Newswire).
HCLTech led Tier I competitors with 8.1% year-over-year BFSI growth—more than double TCS's 1.6% (Hindu Business Line). Coforge outpaced the field with 13.8% BFSI growth, driven by 32% growth in banking and 20% in insurance.
"Banking institutions are under pressure to improve ROE amidst macro uncertainty," explained Coforge's Singh. "Business demand is healthy across commercial banking, lending, wealth management, and risk and compliance."
EXL partnered with the Insurance Council of Australia and Shift Technology to build a national AI-powered fraud detection platform launching in early 2026 (PYMNTS). With insurance fraud exposure up to 20 times higher than banking and deepfake incidents projected to rise over 160%, the demand for AI-powered document verification is intensifying.
Market Projections Paint a Growth Picture
The numbers underscore market confidence:
- RPA overall: $8.12 billion to $28.6 billion by 2031, 28.66% CAGR (Globe Newswire)
- Online OCR: $58.79 billion to $208.5 billion by 2031, 17.2% CAGR (Globe Newswire)
- Hyper automation: $16.2 billion to $77.7 billion by 2032, 25.16% CAGR (Globe Newswire)
- AI purchase order matching: $2 billion to $4.85 billion by 2029, 24.8% CAGR (Globe Newswire)
- Generative AI in insurance: projected to reach $14.35 billion by 2035, with 90% of insurance organizations now utilizing GenAI tools (Globe Newswire)
Cloud-native deployments are growing at 36.95% CAGR, though on-premise solutions still hold 53.62% market share. The Asia-Pacific region leads growth at 34.5% CAGR, driven by government automation initiatives.
Microsoft's Exit Creates Opportunity
Microsoft's shutdown of its Lens mobile scanner app by March 2025 created acquisition opportunities for specialists. PCMag recommended ABBYY FineReader as the iPhone alternative (PCMag UK).
ABBYY CFO Brian Unruh positioned the company's strength in accuracy-critical sectors: "We find customers that benefit, especially in finance and banking, because they have fiduciary responsibilities for accuracy. And so we come in and we can cut their error rate, and that's hard savings for them" (Newsweek).
Meanwhile, Microsoft faced broader strategic pressures. France announced plans to replace Teams across all government departments by 2027, while Germany's Schleswig-Holstein has already migrated away from Microsoft's productivity suite (Hindu Business Line). Windows chief Pavan Davuluri acknowledged the company needs to rebuild user trust: "Trust is earned over time and we are committed to building it back" (Thurrott).
Open Source Matures
Apache PDFBox continued shaping the ecosystem. Its lenient parsing approach inspired LibPDF, a new TypeScript library from Documenso that aims to replicate PDFBox's ability to handle malformed documents other libraries reject (GitHub).
The development validates PDFBox's architectural patterns transcending language boundaries—a benchmark for handling real-world document processing challenges.
India Emerges as Strategic Battleground
Adobe partnered with Bharti Airtel in a global first: free Adobe Express Premium access to 360 million customers across India for one year. "This collaboration will help accelerate India's vibrant creator economy," said Adobe's David Wadhwani (Syllad).
HCLTech emerged as the second-largest training partner in India's government AI skilling program with 80,871 enrollments, trailing only Microsoft's 100,473 (Economic Times).
The Verdict
January 2026 marks a clear inflection point. Enterprises have moved beyond asking "how can we adopt AI?" to demanding measurable business impact. The vendors positioned to deliver—through acquisitions, vertical expertise, or operational excellence—are pulling ahead.
As HCLTech CEO C. Vijayakumar noted: "Certain use cases like AI-led legacy modernization are creating niche interest amongst our clients" (Live Mint). The companies finding those niches—and proving ROI—will define the market's next chapter.
This analysis covers 83 vendors tracked by IDP Software. For individual vendor updates, see the vendor directory.
