From ‘Impossible’ to Enterprise: How Cleafy Cracked the Code on Fraud Prevention Sales to Banks

Selling to banks is notoriously difficult. Selling unproven security technology to banks is nearly impossible. Yet in a recent Category Visionaries episode, Cleafy CEO Matteo Bogana revealed how they did exactly that.

When Cleafy launched in 2014, experts claimed their core technology couldn’t work. “Everybody was telling us, you are trying to fix a problem that is not actually technological complex, but scientifically impossible to do,” Matteo recalls. “There have been ten years of research in this topic between universities and corporations, and so you will not do it.”

The initial sales process was brutal. Despite solving a significant technical challenge – real-time web content tampering detection – Cleafy struggled for two years to land their first customer. The problem wasn’t the technology; it was trust.

“We are mixing together actually cybersecurity and the fraud in the same context and in the same solution,” Matteo explains. “So people were not actually very willing to discuss and to open up their problems when were presenting because were not IBM, were not a consolidated company.”

Instead of pushing harder on direct sales, Cleafy developed an innovative trust-building approach through their threat intelligence unit, Cleafy Labs. “We prefer to have a market in which we create trust, describe into the market what we are able to see, to identify and to manage in a very neutral way,” Matteo shares. This strategy proved transformative – their team now presents at closed-door NATO, Interpol, and FBI events.

The company also discovered that messaging needed to vary significantly between traditional banks and modern fintechs. Banks operate with strict separation between fraud and cybersecurity teams. In contrast, fintechs “already have in place a mindset in which there are no silos and no barriers. There is no difference between cybersecurity, application security, fraud management and integrated financial risk.”

Rather than fighting this organizational reality, Cleafy adapted their approach. For banks, they focused on building consensus across departments. “We spend really a lot of time in meetings and creating consensus and the trust with the first prospect customers before being able to start win the proper traction,” Matteo notes.

Today, Cleafy targets “mid large banks and financial institutions… Fortune 500 customers for sure. And on top of that also all the startups and fintechs that are in an advanced growth phase.” This success stems from their early decision to prioritize trust-building over rapid scaling.

The lesson? When selling complex security solutions to risk-averse enterprises, credibility and trust matter more than feature lists or aggressive sales tactics. Sometimes, the best way to crack enterprise sales is to step back from selling and focus on becoming a trusted authority in your space.