Who is building the modern bank?
- Technology vendors are moving deeper into banks’ cores, workflows, and infrastructure, becoming part of how institutions operate.
- That deeper integration creates new questions around dependency, differentiation, and how much control banks need to retain.
The “Letter from the Editor” is a biweekly series of exclusive insight and opinion-driven analysis from Tearsheet’s Managing Editor Sara Khairi, connecting ideas, questioning assumptions, and tracking shifts across both mature and emerging trends in financial services.
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Issue # 14
Banks have long relied on technology providers for everything from core systems and payment infrastructure to software, data, and specialized capabilities. What is changing now is how deeply those providers are becoming embedded in the bank itself.
A bank today might run its core on one provider, its cloud infrastructure on another, use a third party for payments, bring in fintechs for specific capabilities, rely on external data providers, and increasingly put AI models and agents on top of all of it. They can become part of the workflows, infrastructure, data flows, and decisions that keep the institution running.
The bank still owns the customer, the balance sheet, and the regulatory consequences when something goes wrong. But increasingly, more of the capabilities underneath that relationship are being built, operated, and maintained by companies outside the institution.
So, if more of the technology that makes a bank work is being built elsewhere, what does it actually mean to build a bank today? The answer starts with how all the pieces fit together.
The technology advantage is in the connections
As external providers take on larger pieces of the bank’s infrastructure, the connections between those pieces become part of the technology strategy itself.
KPMG’s 2026 Banking Technology Survey found that 71% of banking executives agree their organizations need to invest in modernizing platforms to bring new or enhanced products and services to market, up from 46% in 2025. Another 77% said technology is a primary driver or one of several key factors in acquisition strategy over the next two to three years.
A modern core on top of fragmented data doesn’t get a bank very far. An AI agent is only as useful as the customer context it can reach. And even the best new capability loses value if employees have to move across six different systems to use it.
The technology advantage is increasingly shifting away from individual products and toward how well a bank can make externally built systems function as one. That connective architecture may become one of the most important pieces of the modern bank.
Who controls the connective architecture?
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