TL;DR
A core banking provider based outside the US reached out to me through LinkedIn last month with a question that turned into a longer conversation. They wanted to enter the US credit union and community bank market and had no idea where to start. The conversation reframed a few things I had been carrying around about cross-border fintech and surfaced a pattern I think every US financial services marketer should be paying closer attention to.
The message arrived on a Tuesday. Polite, well-written, direct. A core banking provider based in another country, looking to enter the US market, wanted to talk. They had found me through LinkedIn search, looked at my background, and reached out cold.
I get a lot of cold messages now. Most are sales pitches dressed up as conversation requests. This one was different. The question they were asking was a real one. It also turned out to be a question that touches a much larger trend I want to write about.
The question
They had a strong product. Modern core banking infrastructure. Real implementations. A track record of moving institutions off legacy cores in their home market. They wanted to bring it north.
Their question was almost embarrassingly basic, and that is exactly why I respected it. “We have no idea how this market actually works. The buying committee, the conferences, the partnership ecosystem, the regulatory posture, the pricing expectations. Where do we even start?”
That question, asked plainly, told me more about them than any pitch deck would have. They had done the math on their product. They had not done the math on the market. They knew the gap and were honest about it.
The conversation went sideways from sales pitch to strategy in about four minutes.
What surprised me about the conversation
Two things surprised me.
The first was how unfamiliar US credit union and community bank dynamics were to a sophisticated international fintech team. They knew the size of the market. They knew the number of charters. They did not know how field of membership works, how the CUSO ecosystem shapes purchasing decisions, how regulatory expectations differ between credit unions and community banks, or why the conference circuit matters so much more in this segment than in any other financial services segment they had operated in.
The second was the assumption they had brought in. They had assumed the US market would behave like a larger version of the markets they already knew. More charters, more dollars, but the same buying behavior at the institutional level. That assumption is wrong, and it is the assumption I see almost every non-US fintech bring to the US credit union channel.
These institutions do not buy like enterprises. They buy like communities. The buying committee is wider, slower, more relationship-driven, and more risk-averse than any commercial banking buyer they had served previously. The deal cycles are longer. The conference is a real revenue channel. The CUSOs and leagues are real distribution. None of this is intuitive from outside the market.
The bigger pattern
I have been watching this category for a while. There is a wave of cross-border fintech and infrastructure providers looking at the US financial services market, especially the credit union and community bank segment, and seeing an opportunity.
The opportunity is real. The US has thousands of credit unions and community banks. Most are running technology stacks that were built two decades ago. The window for modernizing those stacks is wide open. The players who can bring modern infrastructure, modern member experiences, and a credible US partnership story are going to win meaningful share over the next five years.
But the difficulty is also real. The US credit union and community bank channel is a trust channel before it is a technology channel. The institutions that buy from new vendors have to be convinced not just of the product, but of the long-term commitment of the vendor, the partner ecosystem behind the vendor, the regulatory posture of the vendor, and the credibility of the people on the other side of the table.
That last part is not something a non-US fintech can manufacture quickly. It is built through years of presence, the right partners, the right hires, and the right references. Skipping any of those is a way to burn money and walk away frustrated.
What US marketers should take from this
If you are a marketing leader inside a US credit union, community bank, fintech, or vendor in this space, two things are worth absorbing from this story.
The first is that your market is becoming more competitive in a way you cannot see from inside it. Cross-border infrastructure providers, payments players, lending platforms, and member experience tools are looking at your market with serious capital and serious product. The competitive set you have been planning against is going to get crowded with names you have never heard of, faster than you expect.
The second is that the playbook to compete against them is not a feature comparison. It is a depth of relationship. The institutions that win in your space win because they are trusted partners over a long horizon, with deep understanding of how the buyer operates, what they fear, and what they need to defend in front of their board. That trust is your moat. Build it. Protect it. Do not assume the moat is your features, because the features can be matched. The trust cannot, at least not quickly.
What I told them
The advice I gave the team was straightforward. Do not try to enter the market alone. Find one credit union or community bank willing to be a serious pilot partner. Co-build the product to fit US realities. Use that institution as your reference. Build slow. Hire someone with deep US credit union or community bank experience to lead the GTM and trust them to make decisions you would not make from outside the market. Show up at the right conferences for two years before you expect those conferences to produce pipeline. Treat the league system as a real partner, not a venue.
None of that is a fast path. All of it is the right path.
The teams that take this approach are the ones who win share in the US credit union and community bank market in the second half of this decade. The teams that skip it are the ones whose names show up in five years on a list of failed market entries.
The bottom line
The inquiry reminded me how much of what I learned over twenty-five years in this market is invisible from outside it. The dynamics are specific. The buying behavior is specific. The trust required is specific. And the wave of cross-border players coming in is going to test whether the institutions inside the market are ready to defend the share they have been holding.
This is going to be one of the more interesting threads to watch over the next few years. I expect to write more about it. If you are in the middle of it, on either side of the border, the conversation about how this market is going to look in 2030 is one that should be happening in your strategy sessions right now.
It is not happening in most of them. It should be.
Kevin Farley writes about AI visibility, AI readiness, and strategic growth for financial services. Read more on the blog.