In recent decades, technology has become a determining factor underpinning commercial success across every industry. To succeed is to stay at the cutting edge as Google and Amazon have shown. They’re at the forefront of improving the customer experience making it quicker, more intuitive and more attractive to transact. They have set the bar high and the impact of the standards they have set has rippled across all sectors, not least of all banking.

The recent revelations that Google and Facebook plan to enter the payments space has made the banking world sit up and take notice. JP Morgan’s CEO admits he sees them as potential challenger banks and says that they are a very real threat which must be addressed.

According to Celent, banks in Europe will spend more than $62 billion on technology in 2014, an increase of 2.9% on last year. Yet, in spite of this enormous spend, it is difficult to really see what’s being improved. So far this spend has been on evolving legacy systems in a piece-meal fashion and tacking on new extensions to old systems. To make matters worse, these systems and processes are often owned by different business units, residing in silos. This fragile network can, as experience has shown, be toppled by a single component or link in the chain.

Much tech spend in banking is eaten up by keeping up with legislative changes and staying on the compliance conveyor belt. This IT investment is essential in banking but the outcomes have little effect when it comes to improving the customer experience. The daily demands on banks are too great: they are spinning too many plates and inevitably plates will get broken.

Thankfully, banks do not need to do this all on their own. Technical partners exist who can help to insulate banks from technical obsolescence, as well as keeping them compliant. After all, isn’t it best to let banks do what they do best and offload tech to tech experts? These experts can partner with the bank and shoulder the compliance burden, allowing banks to focus on creating attractive, highly functional and secure ways for their customer to interact with them.

As the pace of change in financial services remains high, banks need to invest more in managing the customer experience without the distraction, risk and expense of running a back office. Ensuring a good partnership is in place lifts this burden and allows banks to focus on the real business of banking.