Glancing inside a typical bank's back office, you will find that payments processing relies on well-defined operational processes to keep auditors satisfied and to pare operating costs down to a minimum. Digging a little deeper reveals an organization stressed by customer expectations, new payment infrastructures, and ever-stringent regulatory demands. Can banks compete if they are reliant on outdated technology for the payments function? This TowerGroup Research Note examines the pressures constraining payment operations today and, by considering banks as logistics providers of payments, suggests why banks must invest in an enterprise view of payments to gain competitive advantage.