Conducting Software RFPs for Financial Institutions

2022-07-14

Being one of the top IT consulting firms, Advocate Business Consulting regularly participates in and drives Request For Proposals (RFPs) for introducing new systems or upgrading currently used ones. With the help of our consultants, many Financial Institutions in Hungary were able to carry out several RFP processes in the past 10 years - we believe nothing says more about our consultants’ performance and added value than the fact that every one of our clients has repeatedly worked with our consultants since then.

Carrying out an RFP usually spans over several months, but fortunately with our consultants, many of our clients were able to shorten the timeframe in a way that would guarantee not a single necessary step would be forgotten.

Prior to starting an RFP process, as a first step, a clear picture of the stakeholder departments’ roles and responsibilities in the Bank should be defined. For a succesful RFP and eventually for an implementation project, stakeholders should include carefully weighted and selected business requirements in order to determine the critical requirements of the new or the soon-to-be-upgraded system.

Assessing the needs and requirements of all the participating departments always comes with high responsibility and needs special, in-depth knowledge of the specific business domain and the enabling IT architecture landscape as well. This is where the experience of Advocate consultants was beyond helpful: most of our consultants have 10+ years of experience in the Banking Industry so we were able to fully staff the RFP project teams with the best consultants for the job.

After the assessment of requirements our consultants prepared an industry-specific shortlist of potential vendors and systems who would be invited to the RFP. The RFP naturally includes a detailed questionnaire with an accompanying scorecard - both items were made by our consultants after analyzing the business requirements and assigning the necessary well-thought weightings to each of the business and technical (IT) requirements.

Shortlisting potential vendors always turned out to be an effective tool for shortening the necessary timeframe. After the product and vendor demonstration the evaluation phase has started, during this our consultants helped the stakeholders to evaluate the results as objectively as possible, because any kind of unnecessary false involvement in the wrong solution would be fatal to the long term goals of the client.

With a carefully planned and executed RFP the stakeholders were able to assess all the necessary information which were helping them to make a well-informed decision whether to start the implementation phase or not - which usually started with one of the shortlisted vendors. Advocate consultants were also involved in the implementation phase as well, thanks to our expertise in the Financials industry.