Where to find outbound sales campaigns for embedded finance companies in the UK

Cormac Repman
19 hours ago
5 min read

Embedded finance is growing fast across the UK, but one problem stops most founders cold: how do you actually build an outbound sales engine when you're a small team?

Most embedded finance companies I meet are bootstrapped or early-stage Series A. You don't have a sales infrastructure yet. You've built a good product—APIs, integrations, underwriting models—but you need to reach treasury teams, CFOs, and ops leaders at fintech platforms. The traditional playbook (hire a VP Sales, build a team, wait 6 months) doesn't work when you need revenue in 90 days.

That's why I'm writing this. Here's where to actually find outbound campaigns for embedded finance companies in the UK, and how to run them properly.

What "Outbound Campaigns" Actually Means for Embedded Finance

Before you hunt for campaigns, understand what you're looking for. An outbound campaign in fintech isn't a pre-built list you buy. It's a coordinated effort: target audience research, messaging that speaks to their use case, real conversation threads, and a distribution channel that works.

Most embedded finance founders think they need a huge list of 50,000 prospects. You don't. You need 200-300 qualified conversations per quarter. That's the real metric that matters.

A 3% conversion rate from conversation to pilot is solid for embedded finance. A 15-20% close rate from pilot to contract is realistic. That math means 200 conversations this quarter could become 12-15 pilots in Q3, and 3-4 customers by Q4.

Where to Find Prospect Lists

This is the easy part. The hard part is making them work.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator—still the best source for UK treasury and fintech ops roles. Use these search strings:

Title: "Treasury Manager" or "Head of Treasury" + Location: UK + Company size: 51-1000 employees

Title: "Operations Manager" or "Head of Operations" + Company industry: Financial Services, Fintech

Title: "Finance Director" or "CFO" + Company keyword: "embedded finance" or "banking as a service"

You'll find 2,000-5,000 people per search. Import them into a spreadsheet. That's your starting list.

ZoomInfo and Hunter.io for verified email addresses. Most LinkedIn profiles don't show email directly. ZoomInfo is expensive but accurate (~£300/month for SMB plans). Hunter.io is cheaper (~£40/month) and works well for mid-market companies if your prospects work at stable businesses with standard domain names.

Apollo.io is better than both if you're in a hurry. £100/month gets you 5,000 records with email verification included. Their UK fintech database is solid.

Manual research still works. Look at:

G2 reviews for payroll platforms, expense management tools, lending platforms—see who's integrating embedded finance APIs

Job boards (LinkedIn Jobs, Recruitment Agencies) for fintech platform hiring trends—hiring usually signals growth and new use cases

Twitter/X fintech communities. Follow hashtags like #EmbeddedFinance #Fintech #UKFintech. Real prospects talk about their pain points publicly

For embedded lending specifically, check:

UK Buy Now Pay Later platforms (Klarna's UK team, Clearpay, Laybuy)

Ecommerce platforms running in the UK (Shopify Store, WooCommerce installations)

B2B SaaS platforms targeting SMEs (Xero, FreshBooks integrations)

Building Campaign Structure

Here's the framework I use when structuring a campaign:

Segment by buying role. Don't send the same message to a CFO and an Ops Manager. Treasury teams care about settlement speed and reconciliation. Operations care about onboarding friction. API integrations for developers are a third conversation entirely.

Build a 7-touch sequence. That's 2-3 LinkedIn messages, 2-3 emails, 1 phone call, 1 follow-up call if they engage. Spread them over 21 days.

Use case messaging, not product messaging. Don't lead with "We have embedded lending APIs." Lead with "We got 3 Shopify stores live with embedded lending in 4 weeks. Average order value went up 18%. Want to see what your conversion would look like?"

Track response rates. You should see:

5-8% open rate on cold email (if you've done the research and personalization)

1-2% reply rate (not interested counts as a reply)

8-12% meeting request rate from people who do reply

That math means 1,000 emails = 60 replies = 7 meetings

Real Platforms to Run Campaigns Through

LinkedIn Outreach (manual or via Sales Navigator)—highest trust, but slowest. Plan 4-6 weeks to see results. You'll spend 5-10 hours per week managing threads.

Email (Instantly.ai, Brevo, or Mailshake)—fastest volume, but requires good list quality. Bad lists tank your sender reputation. This is where most embedded finance companies fail. They send to 10,000 bad emails and get blacklisted.

Phone outreach (Dialpad, or outsourced teams)—highest conversion rate. A real person calling a real person converts at 4-6% for embedded finance. But it costs £800-1,500 per campaign (if outsourced) or 30-40 hours of your time (if DIY).

Combination approach (which I recommend)—LinkedIn first for warm-up, email for scale, phone for closing. 2 weeks of LinkedIn reaching out to 50-100 people. Then email the rest of the list. Phone anyone who engages with email.

The Embedded Finance Advantage

Here's what most people miss: embedded finance decision cycles are actually shorter than traditional fintech.

Embedded finance buyers aren't shopping for a "fintech platform." They're trying to solve a specific product problem: "How do we add lending?" or "How do we handle payments?" They already have budget allocated and decision timelines compressed.

A treasury team evaluating three vendors takes 3-4 months. An ops team trying to get embedded lending live in their product takes 4-6 weeks.

That means your campaign doesn't need to last 6 months. Run it hard for 8-12 weeks. If you're not in 4-5 pilot conversations by week 10, the market fit or messaging isn't working. Kill it and restart.

Common Mistakes

Mistake 1: Buying a list and blasting it. Lists decay. 30% of contact info is stale. Bad email health gets you marked as spam. Instead, validate every email first (use MillionVerifier or ZoomInfo's validation tool). It costs £0.01-0.02 per email, but you avoid deliverability hell.

Mistake 2: Generic messaging. "We're an embedded lending platform" doesn't work. "We help B2B SaaS add lending in 4 weeks" does. Specificity wins.

Mistake 3: No clear next step. Don't ask "Want to chat?" Ask "Are you available for a 15-minute call Tuesday or Wednesday?"

Mistake 4: Giving up too early. Most campaigns hit their stride in week 4-6. People are busy. 3 touches is a warm-up. 5-7 touches is where most meetings happen.

How We Do It at Nurturance

We run embedded finance campaigns for fintech founders who don't have sales teams yet. We handle the list research, sequence building, calling, and meeting scheduling. You get a qualified pipeline—not leads, actual meetings booked with real buyers.

Our real calling teams close at 12-18% from conversation to pilot, and clients average 40-60% pilot-to-close rates because we pre-qualify ruthlessly.

If you're an embedded finance company in the UK trying to build pipeline this quarter, let's talk. We work on a pay-per-meeting model through the Glencoco marketplace, so you only pay when you get a real conversation on the calendar.

Book a call at cal.com/nurturance and we'll map out a campaign for your use case.