Selling to fintechs

Fintechs buy services when growth outruns the team that built the product. Your job is to show up right as that gap opens, with a guess about where it hurts.

They aren't banks. They don't buy like banks. But they live under the same rules, and that tension is where most of the work comes from.

Who buys

At an early fintech, the founder or CTO decides almost everything. By the time a company can afford a $150K engagement, the buying shifts to a VP of engineering, a head of platform, a COO, or a chief risk or compliance officer.

The CTO is still in the room for anything touching architecture. The compliance lead is in the room for anything touching customer data, payments or lending decisions. And finance shows up once the number gets real, since a fintech watching its burn reads every invoice.

So you're selling to a committee even at a company of three hundred people. The economic buyer is usually the COO or CTO. The champion is often a director who'll live with the work. The technical lead is whoever owns the platform you'd touch.

What keeps them up at night

Fintechs carry three kinds of pressure at once.

Regulatory pressure comes from examiners, from state licensing, and from the bank partners whose charters many fintechs run on. When a partner bank tightens its oversight, the fintech inherits a stack of new controls almost overnight.

Growth pressure comes from investors. The product has to scale, launch in new markets, add new rails. Engineering teams built for speed find themselves rebuilding for reliability.

Profit pressure is the newest one. Plenty of fintechs used to be measured on growth alone. Now they're asked to show a path to profitability, and that changes what they'll buy. Cost programs, vendor consolidation, automation of manual operations work.

The best services pitches name one of these three and stay there.

The signals that matter here

Funding is louder in fintech than almost anywhere. A new round comes with a plan, and the plan usually includes hiring and building faster than the team can. I covered the window after a raise in funding rounds and the 90 days after.

Hiring for the problem is close behind. A fintech posting for compliance engineers, a head of risk operations, or a payments platform lead is telling you where the budget is going.

A new leader in the buying seat matters a lot. A new CTO or chief compliance officer at a fintech often arrives with a mandate to fix something the board is nervous about.

Regulatory change and partner bank news belong under business pressure. Job posts and engineering blogs that name a platform tell you the stack.

When two or three of these stack at one company in the same few weeks, that's the account to work.

An example opener

Say a fintech in small business lending closed a growth round last month, hired a new chief compliance officer, and posted for two senior engineers on its loan servicing platform. That's three signals in one month.

Here's an opener to the new compliance leader.

Congrats on the new seat. With the round closed and the team hiring on loan servicing, I'd guess the pressure is scaling the book without the controls falling behind, and that the bank partner is asking harder questions than it did a year ago. Is that close, or is the real issue somewhere else?

It names what happened. It ties it to her first months in the job. It makes one guess about the misery. And it gives her an easy way to say yes or correct you.

What to avoid

Don't pitch fintechs like a bank. They hate the comparison and they'll hear it as "slow and expensive."

Don't lead with your banking logos. A fintech CTO wants to know you can move at their speed, not that you've worked for the incumbents they're trying to beat.

Don't overpromise on timelines. Fintech leaders have been burned by vendors who said six weeks and meant six months. Say what you'll do in the first thirty days and do it.

And don't ignore the compliance seat. Engineering may want you, but if the risk team hasn't seen you before the contract, the contract stalls. Reach them early, and reach them with a hypothesis about their problem, not a request to sign off on yours.