Buying Like a Professional – Part 1: Who’s Really in the Room
This is a four-part series on how community banks actually buy technology and why even seasoned bankers buy like amateurs. Part 1: the three sets of motivations across the table.
By: Paul Schaus
June 16, 2026
I spent the first part of my career inside banks as an executive, and the last twenty+ years advising banks and fintechs on the decisions I used to make from the other side of the desk. One conviction has only hardened: experience running a bank does not make you good at buying for one. They have different skills, and the gap between them is where vendors live.
What pushed me to write this series was a couple conversations I had with two bankers I respect, both I have known for years, excellent operators, one managing a good size institution and the other standing up a de novo bank. For the de novo banker, his vision is a good one: a bank that wins on relationship banking, something closer to concierge service than the branch experiences most customers have walked away from, will be a winner. I don't disagree, but the technology he had chosen, an established, older-generation core from a vendor they had worked with for years, is going to make it harder. I told him what I believe — a new institution's one structural advantage is that it carries no legacy, and the fastest way to squander it is to pour the foundation in last decade's concrete. A stack that merely looks current, a modern interface wrapped around an old engine, spends that advantage exactly once.
I agreed, you cannot underestimate the value of relationships. They are the engine of a de novo bank's first couple of years. The board, the founding deposits, and the first commercial clients all arrive through personal networks. But a network is finite, and once you have worked through everyone you know and who they know, what carries the differentiation? My worry was simple: a new bank's single structural advantage is the clean sheet, and filling it with an older-generation core spends that advantage on day one. It is hard to ignore, or argue with the appeal: an older, established platform is generally priced at a very reasonable cost, with little to no implementation expense, and when a de novo's goal is to reach profitability as quickly as they can — capital is still king. But technology is a major expense, second only to people. Modern options are not going to be cheap, at least at the start, but what they provide is flexibility and stronger support for customer relationships. Are they riskier? As with anything in life, you mitigate the risk, and bankers are experts at mitigating risk. Bankers have many choices on how they control technology risk. In the end, a generation-1 core and a decades-old relationship with the vendor's salesperson won the day. And the part I keep thinking about was a comment: regulators had signaled that a current-generation core would require a dedicated, proficient technologist to oversee the infrastructure, so avoiding that hire became one of the biggest factors. That technologist is key for any bank — with today's complex infrastructure, AI-embedded solutions, and digital relationships, you need someone to oversee what the rest of the industry is now spending real money to have in its environment, a shift I have tracked across our core modernization work. A de novo's rare privilege is to start with it. Why do you open your doors already carrying the very problem the rest of the industry is paying to fix?
The differentiation question is not only about relationships. Still, what I hear consistently from bankers across the country is that "our relationship with the customer is our differentiation." It is not wrong, and as said earlier, relationships are key. But they carry a bank only so far, and only for a period of time; in today's market, you need current technology to reinforce the relationship. Where the customer may never set foot in a branch, the relationship itself is delivered almost entirely through technology: a retail or business account opened online, payments initiated across ACH, wire, RTP, and FedNow through digital channels, an SBA loan, a business line of credit, even commercial real estate financing applied for and serviced without a handshake. Technology does not replace the relationship; it reinforces and sustains it, which is why a flexible platform, and a proficient technology resource to run it, manage the vendors and advisors, and keep the stack current, are not luxuries but the cost of doing business. In today's bank, that technology person is your digital relationship officer, and he or she is responsible for building and maintaining the digital experience — the very hire the decision was built to avoid.
In hindsight, the exchange sent me somewhere unexpected. My honest second thought was that the problem might have been me or the structure of the conversation. I was advising for free, and there is a well-documented tendency to discount exactly that: people use advice more when they have paid for it, inferring quality from price the way we do with everything else. Free counsel is weightless. I had handed a friend a conclusion I would charge a client to reach and stripped it of the one signal that makes advice land. (More on that in Part 4, where it turns out to matter how you choose an advisor.)
It is interesting how conversations can be grouped together — that same week, a separate conversation sharpened why the technology piece matters so much. I spoke with the CMO of Agent IQ, whose AI-powered relationship-banking platform is built to carry a personal banking relationship through digital channels. Precisely the challenge a young bank faces once it has worked through its initial network, in a market where roughly seven in ten bank customers never set foot in a branch. We agreed on most of what the product solves. My one emphasis sat where it had with my friend — a layer beneath the product: a relationship tool is only ever as good as the flexible platform you can plug it into.
Between these conversations, the throughline of this series came into focus: banking technology decisions are driven far more by human factors — who we know, what feels familiar, whose judgment we weight — than by the feature matrix in any RFP. That holds for the de novo founder with a blank sheet and, just as much, for the established bank renewing the core it has run for fifteen years. The de novo is simply the sharpest illustration of a dynamic every banker faces. It begins with recognizing that three different parties sit at the table, each wanting something different.
An institution's motivations are almost always the same three, in this order: secure a reliable, well-supported solution; implement it with as little pain as possible; and get the best solution at the best price and terms. Notice what sits on top. The buyer says "price" out loud, but what the buyer fears is regret — the multi-year, hard-to-reverse, career-adjacent regret of a bad core decision. That fear is rational. Gartner finds 56% of technology buyers reported a high degree of regret over their largest purchase, and 60% of those involved in renewal decisions regret nearly every purchase they make. The dominant emotion in this room is not desire. It is fear of being wrong, and a frightened buyer is an easy buyer to lead.
The vendor motivation is the one nobody pretends is a secret, but it explains the downstream behavior. The salesforce exists to negotiate the most profitable contract possible for its employer. The vendor is not your partner during the sale, whatever the logo on the slide says; it is a counterparty optimizing for contract value, margin, and the length of the lock-in. In a market where the big three — FIS, Fiserv, and Jack Henry — serve more than 70% of banks and a core contract commonly runs five to ten years, the most profitable contract and the painless implementation you want are not always the same document.
Then the party buyers underestimate most: the individual carrying the bag. They are not motivated by your reliability or your implementation pain; they are motivated by the sale, and by things behind it you never see. Commission, in software, commonly runs 8% to 15% of contract value, so your "best and final" has a personal paycheck attached. Then job security, promotion, and standing in a small industry where everyone rotates among the same dozen vendors. And quota pressure is sharper than buyers assume: only 51% of reps hit quota in 2024, down from 66% in 2022. The person selling you a platform may be having a worse year than your bank is.
To be fair, this person is not a villain. They manage their own fears — a failed installation, a product weakness surfacing mid-evaluation, a conversion that goes sideways and follows them to their next job. Recognizing that the professional across the table is managing fear, not just chasing a number, is the start of negotiating well.
Before anyone scores an RFP or watches a demo, three motivations are already pulling in different directions: a buyer governed by fear, a company optimizing a decade-long contract, and a professional managing a quota. And none of this spares the experienced buyer — if anything, a long career deepens the pull toward the familiar, which is why the veteran building a brand-new bank is the one most tempted to build it the old way.
In Part 2 of my series, the forces that do the real deciding and never appear on the scorecard: Familiarity, Reputation, Personality, and Culture.
CCG Catalyst advises community and regional banks, credit unions, fintech companies, and de novo founders on technology strategy, vendor selection, and contract negotiation. If your institution is preparing for a core, digital, payments, or fraud decision or building one from scratch, reach out to our team at www.ccgcatalyst.com. For related reading, see our Core Modernization research and the full library at CCG Insights.
See our latest announcement: CCG Catalyst's Paul Schaus Named a 2026 Top Consultant by Consulting Magazine
By: Paul Schaus | Founder & Managing Partner, CCG Catalyst Consulting
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article represent the perspective of CCG Catalyst Consulting based on our direct experience advising financial institutions. This commentary is intended to stimulate industry discussion and does not constitute legal, accounting, or regulatory advice.
