Your RFP is asking yesterday’s questions about tomorrow’s business.

Now contrast this with a modern online banking service or a fintech like Klarna. The traditional bank has a business model that depends on trust, relationships, discretion, and a physical presence - actual bank branches with vaults. The fintech version of a banking service is designed around speed, convenience, automation, and control using digital services. Usually there is no branch network at all - everything is managed by the customer via an app. Most of us are already using banks or payment services like this, but if you look at the industry as a whole then there is a very wide spectrum from the white-glove service of a traditional bank in Switzerland to modern fintech.

This variety - even in a single industry - means that every bank will need help from their suppliers in a different way. Each company may have a different approach to how they manage their technology platforms, how they use AI, and what is their attitude towards service automation and customer experience? Each company will have a different vision of what they need to do for their customers today and what their vision of the future looks like. This leads to a fundamental problem with the traditional RFP-led supplier selection process, because it rarely captures the true needs of the company that creates the RFP.

When the client - in this case one of the banks - creates an RFP they will have some ideas of the processes they are using now and what they want to see from a supplier. They will often create a long list of questions asking ‘how would you do this?’ But this leads to a narrow pipeline. The client has already more or less defined how any solution should be designed, so all the responses to the RFP are just answering the specific questions asked. It becomes like a checkbox exercise. You are finding who is best at answering RFP documents, rather than who might have the best solution.

AI is making the situation even more challenging. The clients are creating RFPs with hundreds of questions - all designed by AI. Naturally, the supplier community feeds these questions into their own AI and asks it to respond. Who is being fooled here? Instead of creating this narrow path, defined by hundreds of questions, why don’t we take a different approach? I know it can work because I have seen it recently in Norway.

A startup was looking to find a supplier to take their customer experience to the next level. Their idea of building an RFP was to work with some consultants on where their business might grow in future - defining a vision, not just a list of questions. They presented this future vision to their potential partners and simply asked, ‘what are your ideas for how we can get to this place?’ It was consultative and intelligent and it allowed each of the shortlisted suppliers to see where the business wanted to go - so they could then be better informed when suggesting ideas. In this case the client is asking ‘imagine you are inside our business - what would you do?’