Community banks are beginning to view potential partnerships with fintech firms as a natural way to compete with some of the larger national banks; while there's not the internal resources available to even consider overhauling their own technology, they view these partnerships as lower cost ways to enhance customer experience or build out their customer base; for their part, fintech firms have been happy to consider any type of bank partnership as a way to help legitimize what they are doing; long term these banks view partnerships as more of a complimentary piece of their business, not a threat to their survival. Source