sales
How to Identify the Right Decision Maker for Payment Infrastructure Deals at a CIS Bank
You pitched a bank's innovation team for three months. Turns out they can't buy anything. Here's how to find the person who actually signs off on payment infrastructure deals at a CIS bank.
You spent three months nurturing a contact at a CIS bank's "innovation department." Great meetings, warm replies, lots of nodding. Then the deal stalls because that person has zero budget authority and never did. You pitched the wrong title the entire time.
This happens constantly in payment infrastructure sales to CIS banks, because the org chart that looks logical from the outside almost never matches who actually signs the contract. Here's how to stop guessing and start targeting the person who can say yes.
Who actually approves payment infrastructure deals at a CIS bank?
In most mid-to-large CIS banks, payment infrastructure purchases (card processing, acquiring, SWIFT/SPFS alternatives, payment gateways, anti-fraud rails) require sign-off from 2-3 roles, not one: the Deputy Chairman or Head of IT/Digital Transformation (budget owner), the Head of Payment Systems or Settlements (technical gatekeeper), and sometimes a Chief Risk Officer if the deal touches compliance or cross-border settlement. Skip any one of these three and your deal dies in internal review — even if you got a verbal yes from someone else.
The innovation/digital team you keep getting routed to by LinkedIn or cold outreach is almost always a scouting layer. They screen vendors, write internal memos, and forward promising ones upward — but they rarely hold procurement authority over six- or seven-figure infrastructure contracts. Treat them as an ally, not your end target.
Why title-matching on LinkedIn fails for CIS banks
LinkedIn penetration among CIS bank executives is low, and many senior decision-makers either don't maintain a profile or keep it dormant. Title searches also mislead you structurally: a "Head of Digital Banking" at one CIS bank might own payment infra end-to-end, while at another bank the exact same title is purely UX/app-focused and has no budget line at all. Russian and CIS bank structures vary bank-to-bank far more than Western ones, so title alone is not a reliable filter.
What actually works is cross-referencing official company registry data with direct contact lookup — not scraping a professional network that most CIS bank executives barely use.
The workflow: registry data to verified Telegram contact
Instead of guessing titles, build your list from the source documents that actually name decision-makers: business registries. This is the same approach that works for finding verified contacts of institutional decision-makers across Russia and CIS — banks included.
Pull the company record from a registry provider. A service like DataNewton lets you filter by industry code (OKVED) and revenue band, surfacing the bank's registered officers — including founders, board members, and in many cases the executives tied to specific business lines.
Connect your AI assistant to the registry API. Give your AI tool (Claude, ChatGPT, etc.) the registry provider's API key so it can query company and officer data on your behalf, instead of you manually cross-checking records one at a time.
Connect the same assistant to CRMChat. Your CRMChat API key lives in Settings → API Keys. Once connected, the assistant can drive CRMChat's contact-lookup tools directly.
Run the lookup sequence. The AI assistant finds the named officer's phone number, then converts that number into a Telegram username — the final step that actually lets you reach them.
Cross-reference the title against the deal size. If the named officer is a board-level figure, confirm whether payment infrastructure sits under their remit before you lead with pricing — a quick first message ("is payment systems something you oversee, or should I loop in the right person?") saves weeks.
Export to CSV and load into your pipeline. Once you have verified name, role, and Telegram handle, it's a clean import into your CRM for sequenced, personalized outreach.
CRMChat includes contact-lookup tools that convert a verified phone number into a usable Telegram username, which is the step most B2B prospecting workflows quietly fail at when targeting CIS numbers. If you've hit dead ends enrichment-side before, it's worth reading why phone number to Telegram enrichment fails for CIS numbers — the usual culprits are stale carrier data and numbers never linked to an active account, not a flaw in the lookup method itself.
Secondary signal: parsing banking and fintech Telegram groups
Registry-to-contact lookup should be your primary method because it targets named, verified individuals directly. But CIS banking and fintech professionals are also unusually active in Telegram-native communities — conferences, fintech associations, payments-industry chat groups. Parsing these groups is a useful secondary layer for broadening your list once you've already locked in your core targets through the registry workflow. Treat group parsing as reach, not precision: it surfaces people adjacent to the right role, but it won't tell you who holds budget authority. For that, you still need the registry-to-contact lookup as your primary signal.
What to check before you message a decision maker
Once you have a name and a Telegram handle, don't fire off a pitch immediately. Run a quick qualification pass first:
Confirm the role is current. Registry filings lag real org changes by months in some CIS jurisdictions — verify the person still holds that title via a recent news mention or the bank's own site.
Check deal-size fit against their level. A Head of Settlements can usually approve smaller integration pilots; a Deputy Chairman is needed for anything requiring board-level capex.
Identify the technical gatekeeper separately. If you found the budget owner, find their counterpart in IT/payment systems too — infrastructure deals almost always need both sign-offs.
Note compliance exposure. If your product touches cross-border settlement or sanctioned-corridor routing, loop in or at least flag the Chief Risk Officer early — deals die late in review when risk wasn't consulted upfront.
Personalize around their actual mandate, not a generic title — reference the specific payment rail or settlement challenge their bank is known to be dealing with.
This qualification habit matters outside banking too — it's the same discipline covered in qualifying SaaS founders as decision makers before Telegram outreach: verify authority before you invest a sequence on them.
Turning verified contacts into a working pipeline
Once your list is built and qualified, the next failure point is usually process, not targeting. A verified decision-maker contact with no tracked follow-up sequence is just a name in a spreadsheet. Set up a deal flow tracking system approach — even a simplified version — so every bank contact has a stage, a next action, and an owner. CRMChat automates sequenced outreach with built-in tracking, so once your decision-maker list is in, you can monitor opens, replies, and stage progression without juggling spreadsheets alongside Telegram. For teams running multiple client campaigns into different banks or regions, separate Telegram accounts per campaign also keeps your deal threads from getting tangled.
Check the CRMChat case studies page for examples of teams running structured outreach at scale, and the help center if you want setup details before connecting your first lookup workflow.
