One System, Two Payment Rails
Two payments platforms sold to regulated finance across Europe on one shared system.
- Timeline
- 9 months · 9 campaigns
- Role
- Ran both platforms as one operation, with an Outlyst team
- Status
- Client engagement
- Primary stack
- Smartlead · Clay · Apollo · LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Headline metrics
- What it tackles
- Two payments platforms in one group, a cross-border payments platform and a payment gateway, both selling into regulated financial services across Europe, where every buyer is cautious, already served, and slow to move providers.
- What it delivers
- One shared outbound system that ran both products, 104 positive replies from 6,336 prospects across nine campaigns, and replies from eToro, the London Stock Exchange Group, PwC Cyprus and Capital.com.
The problem in full
One group ran two payments products covering both halves of a merchant's money movement. The payments platform sells cross-border infrastructure: one API that moves money across SEPA and IBAN-enabled countries, in fiat and crypto, with bank blocks and AML compliance handled. The gateway sells card acceptance, accepting cards since 2019, with high approval rates, uptime, and a flexible rolling reserve for merchants whose risk profile makes ordinary acquiring difficult. Both needed a direct route to buyers who do not answer advertising.
Nobody in regulated financial services is waiting for a payments provider. Every prospect already has one, and changing it is a compliance project rather than a purchase, so the email had to be worth a reply to somebody with no active problem on the day it arrived. And the two products could not share one message: a merchant looking for card acceptance and a broker looking for cross-border payouts are different people with different problems, and an email that tried to serve both would have served neither.
The gateway had a further problem: its market does not group itself by industry. Its buyers are merchants operating under specific licences, and an industry list would have mixed companies whose compliance profile fits the product with companies it was never built for.
System design
I ran both platforms as one operation with an Outlyst team. The gateway never got its own outbound function; it inherited the estate the payments platform was already sending on: dedicated domains, full SPF, DKIM and DMARC authentication, warmed mailboxes, inbox rotation. Each platform sent under its own named identity, so no prospect ever received two different pitches from what looked like one person at one company. The scoring and contact-ranking machinery carried over; only the definition of a good company changed, which is configuration rather than a build. The gateway went live two months after the payments platform, launched in days rather than months.
The two lists were built on two different axes, deliberately. The payments platform was segmented by the instrument its buyers trade: the first campaign took only FX firms regulated by CySEC, 208 leads, a definition small enough to check by hand before a single email went out, then widened to FX, trading and crypto firms across Europe, 698 leads, because that is where cross-border payout friction concentrates. The gateway was segmented by the regulator its buyers answer to: one licensing regime first, 161 leads, then further licensing bodies, then both definitions scaled to volume. Contacts were ranked by what a person is responsible for rather than by job title, because the person who owns payments carries a different title at almost every company.
Every email opened with a line about the person it was addressed to. A research step pulled what the prospect was actually responsible for, and an AI generated one opening sentence from that role, one line, because a paragraph of flattery reads as software. Then the proof: the payments platform's first email carried its transaction volume and payout success rate immediately after the opener, because in payments the buyer's first question is whether you can actually settle. The gateway carried its own evidence, card acceptance since 2019, approval rate and uptime, integration options, the rolling reserve. The ask was a call about how the company moves money, not a demo and not a discount.
A payments reply is worth more than a marketing reply and decays faster, so both platforms fed one reply desk. Every human reply was logged with the company, the thread and a written summary, hand-tagged on arrival, and anything in the interest categories went to that platform's own point of contact the same day with the thread attached. A prospect who asked to be approached after a licensing change or a quarter end was diaried and approached then.
The calls that made it work
Segment the gateway by regulator, not industry
A company operating under a given licence has a compliance profile, a chargeback exposure and an acquiring history the product was built for, and none of that is visible in an industry code. Grouping merchants by their licensing body put the message in front of businesses whose profile already fit, and it matched how those merchants describe themselves to each other. This is the transferable finding of the whole engagement.
Lead with the operating numbers
A regulated buyer discounts adjectives and reads figures. The payments emails carried transaction volume and payout success rate in the first email, because the buyer's first question is never what the product is called, it is whether you can actually settle. The gateway made the same move with its own record: accepting cards since 2019, approval rate, uptime.
One operation, two products, separate identities
The sending estate, the qualification logic and the reply desk were shared, so the second platform launched in days rather than months and the cost of adding it was a list and a message rather than a function. What stayed separate was the surface: each platform sent under its own named identity, and the two lists never mixed, which is what let each message stay single-minded.
Start narrow enough to check by hand
The first payments campaign took 208 CySEC-regulated FX firms and returned a 13.5% reply rate. The first gateway campaign took 161 merchants under one licensing regime and returned 9.3%. A definition that small can be verified before anything is sent, and it sets the standard the scaled campaigns are then measured against.
The results in full
Across nine campaigns and nine months, 6,336 prospects in regulated financial services were contacted with 15,168 emails, producing 454 replies and 104 positive replies, 73 on the payments platform and 31 on the gateway. The payments platform ran 3,713 prospects at a 7.3% reply rate, and the gateway ran 2,623 at 7.0%. The firms that replied with interest include eToro, Leverate, Markets.com, HYCM, InstaForex, PwC Cyprus, GO Markets and CryptoSmart, with interest from institutional names including Capital.com, the London Stock Exchange Group, B2C2, Deriv and Safello, the class of counterparty that changes a payments platform's credibility.
The result with the longest life is the second one: a second product was taken to market on infrastructure that already existed and returned 7.0% against the 7.3% of the operation it inherited. Two products, two markets, one system, and effectively the same rate, which means the cost of adding the next product in the group is a list and a message rather than an operation.
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