5 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building an AI Company Inside a Bank

5 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building an AI Company Inside a Bank

When most founders talk about their go-to-market strategy, they focus on competing. But in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Fabrice Deprez, CEO of Amess, shared a counterintuitive approach: what if you could turn potential competitors into customers by solving their shared problems?

Here are five crucial go-to-market lessons from Amess’s journey from internal bank project to independent AI company:

1. Choose Battles Where Collaboration Beats Competition

The conventional wisdom says startups should avoid markets where they’ll compete with large incumbents. Amess took a different approach: they chose a market where even competitors want each other to succeed.

As Fabrice explains, “This fight against financial crime is a common fight between all banks. And this doesn’t bring any commercial advantage… it’s a common obligation to do that correctly, just to keep the trust on the market.”

This insight transformed potential competitors into customers. “We visited already 26 banks spread over Europe… Every time we receive that same answer, yes, we imply that it’s a common fight and we should fight that together.”

2. Build Real Technology Before Going to Market

In today’s AI gold rush, many companies rush to market with minimal viable products. Amess took the opposite approach, spending five years on development and testing before launch.

“The first three years it was purely development and then two years of testing, tuning, until the algorithms were delivering the result that we wanted,” Fabrice shares. This investment paid off – their solution improves detection rates by 3-4x while reducing false positives.

3. Turn Your Corporate Connection into an Asset

Rather than hiding their connection to KBC Group, Amess leveraged it to build credibility. As Fabrice notes, “We had to build an organization, we had to attract people. We had to develop a commercial plan, financial plan, and just go on the market and put the name on the street.”

This strategy is already showing results: “We already have our first three customers outside the group which is already positive. We have an outlook of being financially independent as of mid of next year. So two years after launch being profitable.”

4. Target Industry-Wide Pain Points

Amess focused on solving a problem that keeps every bank executive awake at night. “In countries like the Netherlands, like Belgium, it’s multi billions of work that is done by the bank in order to comply with regulation about identifying money laundering patterns,” Fabrice explains.

The current approach isn’t working: “More than 90% of the work that the people are doing is just a false positive, meaning a work which was unnecessary.” By targeting this shared pain point, Amess made their solution relevant to every bank.

5. Build for Scale from Day One

Rather than starting small, Amess planned for industry-wide adoption from the beginning. Their roadmap extends beyond their initial anti-money laundering solution to “a full roadmap of full financial crime which goes from AML fraud and sanctions, cyber protection and everything.”

These lessons demonstrate a powerful alternative to the typical startup playbook. Instead of disrupting an industry from the outside, Amess is transforming it from within by solving problems that affect every player in the market. Their rapid path to profitability – projected within just two years of launch – suggests this collaborative approach to go-to-market strategy can be more effective than traditional competitive strategies.

For founders building enterprise software, particularly those commercializing internal tools, Amess’s journey offers a valuable template: find the problems your industry needs to solve together, build real technology to solve them, and turn your corporate connections into assets rather than liabilities.