Account Executive

Overview

You sell Worth's onboarding and underwriting automation platform to banks, credit unions, fintechs, lenders, and payment processors. You're running full-cycle sales—prospecting into target accounts, demoing the platform, managing multi-stakeholder deals, and closing contracts. Most deals involve compliance, risk, operations, and IT teams, so you're navigating complex organizations and long sales cycles.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Early growth stage (62 employees, actively hiring)

Size: 62 employees

Growth: Scaling sales and engineering teams simultaneously—suggests they're adding customers and building out the product

Market Position: Competing in a crowded space (KYC/KYB automation, onboarding platforms) but focused on financial institutions with a unique small business database angle. You're often competing against "do nothing" or legacy manual processes.

GTM Reality

Pipeline Sources:

• 60% Outbound - you're building lists of target financial institutions, cold calling/emailing into compliance and operations teams
• 30% Inbound - some leads from website, content, referrals from existing customers
• 10% Partners - potentially ISV partnerships or referrals from core banking system vendors

SDR/AE Structure: Likely self-sourcing with possible SDR support for larger accounts. At 62 people, they probably don't have a huge SDR team.

SE Support: You'll probably get sales engineering support for technical demos and POCs, but you're expected to handle most early conversations yourself.

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors: Alloy, Middesk, Persona, Socure (identity verification), Plaid (data access), legacy KYC vendors, manual processes

How They Differentiate: Worth's small business database and "Cross-Walking Technology" for data matching, consolidating multiple onboarding/underwriting tools into one platform

Common Objections: "We already have a KYC vendor," "Too expensive to switch," "Our compliance team prefers manual review," "Integration with our core system is too complex," "Regulatory concerns about automated decisions"

Win Themes: Speed to revenue (faster onboarding = more customers), fraud reduction, regulatory compliance confidence, consolidating point solutions, better data accuracy

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Prospecting (30%) | Active Deals (35%) | Demos & Discovery (20%) | Internal Meetings (15%)

Key Activities

• Prospecting and outreach: Building lists of target banks, fintechs, and lenders. Cold calling into compliance, operations, and risk teams. You're trying to get initial meetings with people who don't think they have a problem.
• Discovery calls: Understanding their current onboarding process, pain points (how many applications they reject, fraud losses, time to approval), and who's involved in buying decisions. These take 2-3 calls to map out.
• Product demos: Walking through how Worth automates KYC/KYB checks, workflow management, fraud detection, and underwriting. You're showing ROI—how much time/money they'll save and how many more customers they can onboard.
• Multi-threaded selling: Financial institutions have 5-10 stakeholders involved (compliance officer, head of operations, IT/engineering, risk team, sometimes CEO/CFO). You're scheduling separate calls with each, building consensus, and navigating politics.
• POCs and technical evaluations: Many deals require proof-of-concepts where Worth integrates with their systems and processes test applications. This takes 4-8 weeks and heavy SE involvement.
• Navigating procurement and legal: Once you have verbal agreement, deals sit in legal and procurement for 6-12 weeks. You're chasing redlines, negotiating MSAs, and waiting on signature authority.
• Pipeline management: Keeping 15-25 active opportunities moving, updating CRM, forecasting, and running deal reviews with your manager.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Long, unpredictable cycles: Deals that look like they'll close in Q2 slip to Q4. Financial institutions move slowly, and compliance reviews add months. Forecasting is difficult.
• Complex buying committees: You need buy-in from compliance, operations, IT, risk, legal, and procurement. Any one of them can kill the deal or delay it indefinitely.
• Competing against "do nothing": Many prospects acknowledge the problem but aren't convinced switching is worth the effort. Inertia is your biggest competitor.
• Technical hurdles: Integration with legacy core banking systems is hard. IT teams are skeptical, and failed POCs kill deals.
• Regulatory sensitivity: Buyers are cautious about automated underwriting decisions. One compliance mistake could mean regulatory fines, so they move conservatively.
• Heavy self-sourcing: You're doing a lot of your own prospecting. If you're not comfortable cold calling compliance officers at community banks, you'll struggle.

What Success Looks Like

• 6-10 closed deals per year: Hitting quota means closing $600K-$900K annually, roughly one deal every 5-7 weeks
• Building a pipeline 4-5x quota: You need $2.5M-$4M in pipeline because deals slip and fall out constantly
• Multi-threading wins: Your best deals have 3-4 internal champions you're working with
• Clean POCs: Getting through technical evaluations without major issues is a huge win signal

Who You're Selling To

Primary Buyers:

• VP/Director of Operations or Head of Onboarding at banks/fintechs (main champion)
• Chief Compliance Officer or Compliance Director (must approve regulatory aspects)
• VP of Risk or Head of Underwriting (cares about fraud detection and credit decisions)
• CTO or Head of Engineering (evaluates technical feasibility and integration)

What They Care About:

• Regulatory compliance: Will this platform pass audits? Can they explain automated decisions to regulators?
• Speed to revenue: How much faster can they approve applications and onboard customers?
• Fraud/risk reduction: Are they catching more fraudulent applications and reducing losses?
• Integration effort: How hard is it to integrate with their core banking system, and who owns the implementation?
• Cost/ROI: Can they justify the expense by showing operational savings or revenue increase?
• Vendor risk: What happens if Worth goes out of business or has downtime?

Requirements

• 3-5 years selling B2B SaaS to financial institutions, fintechs, or regulated industries
• Experience with full-cycle enterprise sales—prospecting through close
• Comfortable selling technical products with complex integrations and POCs
• Proven ability to navigate multi-stakeholder deals with long sales cycles
• Track record of hitting quota in a $600K+ annual number
• Familiarity with KYC/KYB, compliance, underwriting, or fintech workflows is a plus