Despite new rules expected to eliminate billions of dollars of revenue from banks nationwide, FIs will continue to spend on innovation areas of financial services in 2012.

At least that’s what Fiserv Inc. reported during its 4Q earnings call yesterday. Though the vendor expects technology spend growth to be about the same year over year, Fiserv also expects financial institutions to send their money on innovative areas, like mobile and P2P.

Jeffery Yabuki, president and chief executive, said mobile is not viewed as discretionary spending from FIs.

Now I haven’t met a single “banker,” right, someone who runs a large institution, whether it’s a credit union or a bank, who is willing to defer a mobile decision. People just are not willing to do that and they’re really looking for ways to drive revenue. And that, right now, is a good fit for us given where we have chosen to invest over the last several years. Don’t get me wrong. I still think there’s a lot of – there’s going to be a lot of profitability pressure in financial institutions. I still think we’re going to be subject to price compression as we have been.

On the same call, Yabuki leaked an interesting comment regarding P2P services, too. Though he said most Fiserv clients are not charging their customers for using their P2P services, that dynamic may change in the coming months because of product developments from Fiserv that are expected to hit the second quarter of this year.

“There are some areas like funding transactions to or from prepaid, things like that, where there are some revenue opportunities,” Yabuki said.