Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Tally Sweiss · Zafin · August 2026
Here is the map. Selling core platform software into regulated banks has an unusual shape: the total number of buyers is small enough to name, and almost every deal needs two signatures from two functions that do not share a channel, an event or an inbox. Below are the institution groups, who signs inside each, and roughly how many there are. It describes the market rather than your business, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Global and national banking groups
The named tier. Short enough to write on one page, long enough to keep a team busy for years, and the group where the reference value of a single logo carries the rest of the map. Multi-year cycles, and the entry point is a person rather than a campaign.
Who signs: group chief product officer, head of retail products, chief information officer, head of core transformation, chief data officer.
90 to 120
banking groups worldwide with the scale to fund a multi-year core modernization program
US regional and community banks
The band where product and rate structures are still run out of spreadsheets and core vendor tickets, and where margin pressure makes that visible to the board. Faster decisions than the top tier, and a real budget only in the upper slice of the count.
Who signs: chief product officer, head of deposits, head of business banking, chief technology officer, chief operating officer.
4,000 to 4,600
insured US banks, of which roughly 700 to 900 carry the scale to fund a product platform change
US credit unions
Structurally similar problems, a very different buying culture, and a strong peer network that turns one reference into several conversations. The underworked part of the North American map, because enterprise sales teams tend to size the segment by count and dismiss it.
Who signs: chief lending officer, vice president of products, chief information officer, chief experience officer.
4,300 to 4,700
federally insured US credit unions, of which roughly 400 to 500 sit above the scale where product and rate work becomes a funded project
European credit institutions
Fragmented by country and by group structure, with cooperative and savings networks buying through shared technology bodies rather than one at a time. Reaching this segment properly is a language and structure problem before it is a product one.
Who signs: head of retail banking, chief product owner, head of IT architecture, transformation director.
4,500 to 5,200
credit institutions across Europe, of which roughly 350 to 400 are supervised as significant and behave like enterprise buyers
Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the Gulf
Small, concentrated markets where a handful of institutions dominate and everyone watches what the others buy. Highly referenceable, and short enough that the whole segment can be worked by name rather than sampled.
Who signs: chief product officer, head of everyday banking, chief information officer, head of digital.
250 to 350
banks, mutuals and building societies across these markets, most of them known to each other
The advisory and integrator channel
Not a customer segment, a distribution one. These firms sit inside the account before the software decision exists, and their practice leads are a finite, nameable group. The trade is reach in exchange for sharing the room.
Who signs: banking practice lead, alliance and partnership director, delivery principal, sector managing director.
300 to 450
consultancies, core platform partners and systems integrators with a dedicated banking practice; not enumerated in any public register, so this is the softest count here

Where the openings are

1
Two signatures, two organizations, one deal. The product side feels the problem and the technology side owns the platform. They read different publications, attend different events and answer to different numbers. A channel tuned to one of them tends to stall in front of the other, and the stall usually looks like a slow quarter rather than a reach failure.
2
The buyer is a seat, and the seats move. Heads of product, chief product officers and transformation leads change roles on a two to three year rhythm, and a new one almost always reopens the platform question inside their first two quarters. Watching several thousand named seats for that change is mechanical work. It is exactly the work a referral or partner channel cannot do.
3
A partner channel reaches banks that have already decided to spend. That is a strong place to be and a narrow one, because by the time you arrive the shortlist exists and the frame is someone else's. The larger group is the several thousand institutions that have not started, where the first conversation is about the problem and there is no shortlist to be third on.
4
The mid-tier is where the count is, and it is the least contested. Below the named global tier, roughly 1,400 to 1,800 US and European institutions have the scale to fund this work and none of the internal build capacity the top of the market uses to avoid buying it. They are reachable by name, they are not being called, and they are the part of this map a built channel changes fastest.
Built from public market data on regulated financial institutions across North America, Europe, the Asia Pacific and the Gulf, with counts banded deliberately. Institution counts move continually with consolidation, and asset scale is used as a proxy for the point at which a platform change becomes a funded project rather than an internal workaround. Consultancies and integrators are not enumerated in any public register and are described rather than counted.
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