Regtech companies sell to compliance teams by naming one regulatory risk the buyer owns, proving the fix on the buyer's own historical data, and sending the security and documentation pack before anyone asks for it. A Head of Financial Crime answers to the regulator for every control they approve, so they buy evidence that will hold up in an examination.
Who inside a compliance team makes the decision?
The Money Laundering Reporting Officer (MLRO) or Head of Financial Crime owns the decision at most fintechs, payment firms and challenger banks. The Chief Compliance Officer sets the budget at larger firms. Analysts and the operations lead use the tool every day, and their workload is the first thing a new tool changes.
Each person needs a different proof:
| Role | What they answer for | What to show them |
|---|---|---|
| MLRO or Head of Financial Crime | Whether controls work, in front of the regulator | Results on their own past cases, an audit trail, how a decision is explained |
| Chief Compliance Officer | Budget, headcount, board reporting | Cost per case reviewed today against cost with the tool |
| Compliance operations lead | Queue size and analyst time | Alerts per analyst per day, before and after |
| CTO or data lead | Integration effort and data handling | API docs, data residency, the hours their team must spend |
Start with the MLRO. A champion in operations can ask for a demo, but only the person who signs the risk assessment can move the purchase.
What do compliance leaders worry about most?
They worry about a control that fails quietly while the company grows. Two UK fines show the pattern in the regulator's own words.
The FCA fined Starling Bank £28,959,426 on 2 October 2024. Its automated screening had checked customers against only a fraction of the full sanctions list since 2017. Starling also opened more than 54,000 accounts for 49,000 high-risk customers between September 2021 and November 2023 while an FCA requirement barred it from doing so. Its customer base grew from about 43,000 in 2017 to 3.6 million in 2023 (FCA, 2 October 2024).
The FCA fined Monzo £21,091,300 in July 2025. Monzo onboarded customers on limited and sometimes implausible information, and signed up more than 34,000 high-risk customers in breach of an FCA requirement between August 2020 and June 2022. Its customers grew from about 600,000 in 2018 to more than 5.8 million in 2022. The FCA called it the 10th financial crime control fine it had imposed on a bank in four years (FCA, 8 July 2025; Final Notice).
In both cases the FCA said controls did not keep pace with growth. A compliance lead at a fast-growing fintech reads those notices as a description of their own next exam. Build the pitch around that exact risk: what happens to their controls when volume doubles.
What should the first message say?
The first message should cite one public finding that matches the prospect's business model and ask one question about the control they run today. Describe the finding as a fact about another firm, and leave the prospect's own compliance out of it.
Use this structure:
- One public finding. Quote a fact from a final notice or enforcement order that fits their model. A sanctions screening gap fits a payments firm. An onboarding gap fits a neobank.
- One question about their control. "How do you test that your screening list covers the full consolidated list after each update?"
- One offer that costs them nothing to accept. A back-test on their own closed cases, under their data rules.
- One ask. Twenty minutes with the person who owns the control.
Leave out product tours, AI claims and logos in the first touch. The MLRO wants to know whether you understand their exposure.
How do you prove value to a compliance buyer?
Prove it on their data, in their environment, against cases they have already closed. A back-test on those cases shows whether the tool would have changed an outcome.
Run the back-test like this:
- Agree a fixed set of closed alerts or onboarding files with the MLRO, plus the outcome of each.
- Run your tool on the same set, inside their environment or under a signed data processing agreement.
- Report three counts: cases your tool cleared that their analysts also cleared, cases it escalated that turned into reports, and cases it would have missed.
- Write down every rule, threshold and model version used, so their auditor can repeat the test.
- Give the MLRO a one-page result they can show their board without editing.
Step 3 carries the deal. A tool that clears more alerts but misses one case that became a report loses to the current process. Show the misses plainly.
How do you reach compliance leaders by email?
Reach them with lists you verified in the week you send. Contact data on fintech teams decays fast. In October 2026 we re-verified 520 B2B contacts, mostly fintech, that a verifier had passed as deliverable about 10 weeks earlier: 349 came back valid (67%), 53 catch-all (10%) and 118 invalid (23%) (our data, October 2026; two different verifiers, July and October). On the first 600 emails of one campaign, a list verified the week before sending bounced at 0%, while lists verified about 10 weeks earlier bounced at 3.7% to 5.2% (our data, October 2026; small samples of 43 to 219 sends per segment).
A high bounce rate damages the sending domain for every later email to that firm. We cover the method in how fast verified B2B email lists decay.
Compliance leaders also read regulator speeches, final notices and the trade press. When a new final notice lands, write a short analysis of what it means for one business model and send it to the ten MLROs it affects most.
What should a regtech team do before the first call?
Use this checklist:
- Pick one regulatory risk your product reduces, and find two public enforcement findings that describe it.
- Name the MLRO or Head of Financial Crime at each target account, and verify the address within 7 days of sending.
- Prepare the security pack: certifications, penetration test summary, data residency, subprocessors.
- Write the back-test plan on one page, with the three counts you will report.
- Prepare an explanation of how each automated decision is made, written for an auditor.
- Book the operations lead into the second call, after the MLRO agrees the test.
To find the compliance leaders in your segment and build a verified list for your first campaign, start with The Diagnostic at $2,500.