[HyprMusic]

As someone in this space, I highly recommend you start engaging with your potential customers and building trust ASAP. It took us a lot longer than 5 years to gain enough trust to convince our customers over to our core banking platform - despite their existing platforms being fraught with bugs, limitations and insecurities.

[mndgs]

We are sort-of scouting the area with a few potential small prospects.. the feedback so far is very positive, but none have committed cash on the table. Hard sales process is expected and at the same unnerving: we're in b2b market and a narrow, highly specialized niche - finding the right clients is tough (and we don't have the cash and/or time for that).

[gverrilla]

Have you got some text describing the process of building trust, by any chance? I'm going through a similar challenge (but it's on agriculture instead of banking): 3 years in, trying to build trust with large clients.

[HyprMusic]

I think the thing that helped the most is we built great relationships with our small clients. We convinced them to let us observe their day to day, speak to staff etc. From that we got an intimate idea of all their biggest pain points and we were able to offer complimentary products that worked with their existing core banking (and abstracted it wherever possible). Things like secure communications, document management, form builders - things we were planning on building after our core banking but were actually a bigger pain point for them. It made such a difference to the actual staff that they would be bragging about us at conferences and networking events. Eventually the word spread in the community/industry and soon enough the big clients went from ignoring our calls to asking for "exactly what they have" (referring to the small clients who took the risk innovating).

TLDR: Try starting with easier to sell, complimentary products. Focus on the smaller clients as they're more willing to innovate. Do such a good job that they can't help but brag.

[mndgs]

This resonates with the strategy I've been trying to pivot our project to: instead of trying to sell all-in-one solution for large-/mid-size bank (easily 100K+ in revenue per case), rather "productize" smaller tools, make them understandable and easily accessible to a wider, smaller range of clients. Example: FATCA/CRS reporting - a thing that any fintech/bank/insurance company needs to do (and hates ); we give a tool which eliminates 80% of the hassle, just get your reportable client list.

So, I on the right path?