of active FDIC-insured banks report $500M or less in total assets (30 June 2026)
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, 2026of community bankers surveyed in 2024 reported no relationship with a fintech firm
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 2024Company size can’t show which accounts buy outside their platform
Company size tells you how big an account is, but not whether it ever buys from anyone besides its platform vendor. Where a single platform runs an account’s core work, many accounts take every module from that vendor. The 3 largest core banking providers served more than 70% of US banks surveyed in 2022.↗ Healthcare providers on Epic strongly prefer EHR-native solutions to third-party ones.↗
Size and platform dependence do move together on average, because smaller accounts usually have fewer people to buy, connect and oversee a second vendor. But you tier account by account, and the average misleads at both ends. A size cut-off keeps large accounts that take the whole bundle. It drops small ones that buy the best tool they can find.
That is how half a pipeline fills with accounts that never buy add-ons, while the ones that would get the same nurture email as everyone else. Tier on evidence of buying independence instead, and use size only to estimate deal potential.
Score buying independence on evidence you can check
Buying independence is evidence, found at a named source, that an account bought from a vendor other than its platform provider in the last 3 years.↗ Rank the evidence from strongest to weakest:
- A named product from another vendor, live in your category or the one next to it
- A named product from another vendor in any category, bought in the last 3 years
- The account’s own answer to your discovery question, recorded with its date
- A job post that names a system from outside the platform, or a role that manages vendors
Look in vendors’ announcements and customer lists, and in case studies and conference talks where the account’s people describe a tool. Then check the account’s own news, annual report and job posts. Treat a technographic tag as a lead that stays inferred until you find the source behind it. Count 2 facts against an account: the platform’s own module live in your category, and 3 years without an outside purchase.↗
Add a question to every first conversation and record the answer with its date: ‘What was the last product you bought from another vendor, and who signed for it?’ The answer shows whether the account buys outside, and which seat signs.
Give each criterion its own field on the account, with its evidence link, the date it was checked and a confidence: verified, inferred or unverified.↗ An account with unverified evidence goes to a research queue, never into a tier.↗
Then test the criterion on your own deals before it decides anything. Mark each won and lost deal of the last 24 months as independent or platform-bound when it started.↗ Panel Check’s check T2 looks for a segment whose win rate is at least 1.5× the average, on at least 10 closed deals.↗ If independent accounts clear that bar, the criterion earns its place in the tier rule. If they don’t, it stays a hypothesis.
Let the tier set the motion and the spend
Once fit decides the tier, the tier decides which motion an account gets and what you spend on it. Write the rule down before the event calendar fills up:
| Tier | Entry rule | Motion and spend |
|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 | Verified outside buyer with deal potential and 3–5 required seats named; 5–15 per account executive | 1:1. Executive dinners, peer introductions, executive meetings and meetings booked at events |
| Tier 2 | Verified outside buyer whose seats aren’t named yet; 20–60 per account executive | 1:few. Outreach on a dated signal, events only where they attend, no dinner seats |
| Tier 3 | No evidence of outside buying yet | No dinner, booth or outbound budget until a signal changes the evidence |
| Research queue | Evidence inferred or unverified | Research only; no tier until the evidence is verified |
Tier 1 holds verified buyers with deal potential and seats you can name. Start with 3–5 required seats per tier: the seat that owns your problem, the budget owner, an IT or security seat and any seat that can veto.↗ Size each tier to your sellers: Panelhop’s working ranges are 5–15 accounts per account executive in Tier 1, 20–60 in Tier 2 and 100–500 in Tier 3.↗ Tier 1 gets the personal, expensive motions. In a 2026 survey of 300 B2B companies, network and introductions ranked as the best channel and intimate events second.↗
Tier 2 holds verified buyers whose seats you haven’t named yet. They get outreach when a dated signal gives a reason to write, and events only where they already attend. Tier 3 holds accounts with no evidence yet. They get no dinner seats, booth budget or outbound until a signal changes the evidence.↗ Even signal-based outreach needs a ceiling, so the list survives. Panelhop’s own defaults allow at most 15 first touches a week per founder and don’t bring an account back within 8 weeks unless a new signal arrives.↗
Before any event, check which Tier 1–2 accounts will attend and book meetings with their empty seats 4–6 weeks ahead.↗ Afterwards, count the Tier 1–2 accounts where the event engaged a seat that had no two-way exchange in the previous 90 days.↗ Report that beside the same count for the 90 days before the event.↗ Then divide the full cost by the count, so a dinner, a booth and a month of signal-based outreach compete on a single number.
Re-tier the day the evidence changes
Move an account as soon as its evidence changes, and review the whole list each quarter by a written rule.↗ Watch for 4 events in particular:↗
- An announced purchase from another vendor: the account has bought and connected an outsider once and has a way to do it again
- A platform conversion or renewal, when the account reviews what it takes from the platform
- A new leader in the seat you sell to, especially one who bought from outside vendors before
- A merger, which reopens the platform question for both sides
Moves go down as well as up: an account that replaces its only outside product with the platform’s module drops to Tier 3. An AI pass may propose moves with reasons, but the list owner approves each one.↗ Re-check the evidence before any account enters Tier 1, and record the date and the reason on the account so sellers can see why it moved.
How the tiering works for a third-party risk vendor selling to banks
For a third-party risk vendor, the tiering starts from a single fact: buying outside the core is both the fit test and the size of the problem. Each outside vendor a bank adds is another third party to oversee. Most banks are small: of the 4,214 active FDIC-insured banks with assets on file, 2,427 (58%) report $500M or less.↗ A pipeline that is half small banks mirrors the market.
More than half of US banks report $500M or less in total assets
Data behind this chart
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| $500M or less | 2427 |
| $500M–$1B | 743 |
| $1–10B | 884 |
| More than $10B | 160 |
Small doesn’t mean locked. Nearly 370 community bankers answered the 2024 CSBS survey, about 2 in 3 from banks of $100M–$1B.↗ Only 32% reported no relationship with a fintech firm, down from 59% in 2023.↗ Many banks still take the bundle. In ABA’s core platforms survey, fees for implementing a third-party provider came a close second among the contract terms banks find most problematic.↗
Here is an illustrative case with a fictional vendor: a $60k ACV, 2 account executives and 700 US banks on its list, 380 of them at $500M or less.↗ It finds a named outside purchase in risk, compliance, security or vendor management at 52 small banks and 98 larger ones, and sends 108 more to research.↗ A size cut would have kept 160 larger banks with no outside purchase in 3 years and dropped all 52 small buyers.↗
The 150 verified buyers fill Tier 1 (30 banks, 15 per seller, 8 at $500M or less) and Tier 2 (120).↗ Each Tier 1 bank needs 4 seats named: the chief risk or compliance officer, the vendor management officer, the information security officer and an executive sponsor.↗ All 4 are among the 7 seats that can veto a risk and compliance software deal.↗
A dinner for 20 bank CEOs, filled from Tier 1, needs 2 in 3 of those 30 banks to accept.↗ And the CEO fills at most 1 of the 4 seats the deal needs.↗ Smaller dinners for the risk and vendor management seats, each hosted by a customer’s risk officer, reach the seats that own the problem.↗ If booth visitors mirror the list, about 63% of the conversations are with Tier 3 banks.↗ Tier 2 banks get outreach when a dated signal fires, such as an enforcement action, which the OCC publishes every month.↗
Fit decides the tier, and the tier decides the channel
We think most channel debates are tiering questions in disguise. A booth, a dinner and an outbound sequence differ mainly in which accounts and seats they reach, and at what cost per account. Settle the tiers first, and the channel choice mostly follows.
We’d rather work a shorter list of accounts that already buy outside their platform than a longer one sorted by size. We think seller attention and event budget are the scarce inputs. Spread over accounts that can’t buy, both thin out, and in a finite market the accounts you burn don’t come back. A strict tier also makes the next decision easy: when a seat opens at a dinner, the next account to invite is obvious.
The motion should follow what the deal needs, just as it follows deal size. A Tier 1 account where you can name the seat that owns the problem, and a risk or security seat that could veto, may justify an executive dinner. A looser fit gets signal-based outreach or nothing. If a channel can’t name the Tier 1 and 2 accounts it will reach, we wouldn’t fund it. We don’t think there is a right list length, because it depends on your sellers and your ACV. We do think every account should carry a written reason for its tier.
In practice
How we do it at Panelhop
In a Panel Check (GTM audit · 2–3 weeks), 4 of the 32 checks cover targeting: a named list in the CRM, fit drawn from won and lost deals, tiers that match seller capacity and the share of new pipeline from Tier 1–2 accounts. Where a single platform dominates your market, we test buying independence on your last 24 months of deals before it decides a tier.
In a Leak Fix (we build the fixes), we put the evidence link, date checked, confidence, tier and owner on every account, write the motion rules for each tier and leave a written quarterly re-tier rule. Signal Desk (in-market accounts, weekly) then watches the tiers and brings accounts whose evidence or signals change to their owner with a brief. Your team approves and sends every first touch.
Questions buyers ask about this
We sell third-party risk software to banks, and half our pipeline is banks under $500M that take everything from their core provider. How do we spot the banks that buy outside the core?
Look for a named product from another vendor, live in risk, compliance, security or vendor management within the last 3 years: vendor announcements, case studies, the bank’s own news and its job posts. Then check you can name its chief risk or compliance officer and its vendor management officer. Small banks that pass go into your tiers, and large banks with no evidence go to Tier 3.
A booth at a big community banking conference, a private dinner for 20 bank CEOs or signal-based outbound: which gets more first meetings at a $60k ACV?
Count only first meetings with a required seat at a Tier 1 or 2 bank. A booth draws from the whole market, so its meetings follow the market’s tier mix; a CEO dinner pays only if Tier 1 banks fill it and the CEO is a seat your deal needs; signal-based outbound is the steady source for Tier 2. Compare all 3 on full cost per Tier 1–2 bank with a newly engaged seat.
Should we stop selling to small accounts altogether?
No. Move accounts with no evidence of outside buying to Tier 3, whatever their size, and keep small accounts with evidence in Tier 1 or 2. Size only estimates deal potential inside a tier.
When does a platform-bound account move up a tier?
When its evidence changes: an announced purchase from another vendor, a platform conversion or renewal, a new leader in the seat you sell to or a merger. Move it that day, review the whole list each quarter by a written rule and re-check the evidence before any account enters Tier 1.
Does buying independence work as a fit test outside banking?
Yes, wherever a single platform runs an account’s core work: hospitals and their EHR, manufacturers and their ERP, telecom operators and their billing stack. The test stays the same: a recent purchase from another vendor and a named person in the seat that owns your problem.
