In today’s fast-moving financial services landscape, enterprise leaders face the challenge of choosing the right partners to power payments, card programs, and account capabilities. The stakes are high: the wrong choice can mean compliance risks, operational bottlenecks, or missed opportunities for innovation.
That’s why the Request for Proposal (RFP) remains one of the most effective tools available to enterprises when selecting a Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) partner.
At Edenred Payment Solutions, we’ve been on both sides of the process - as a leading BaaS provider and as a frequent recipient of RFPs.
In this blog, we draw on our experience to share with you the best practices, critical areas to assess, and advice to navigate a complex BaaS vendor evaluation and procurement process.
Why an RFP matters in financial services
For enterprise leaders, an RFP is more than a procurement formality. It’s a framework for making confident, auditable, and future-proof vendor decisions.
🔷 Structured decision-making: RFPs ensure that complex requirements such as compliance reporting, real-time data processing, and scalability are defined and evaluated systematically.
🔷 Transparency and accountability: With increasing regulatory scrutiny, RFPs create a documented audit trail for boards, regulators, and internal governance.
🔷 Vendor accountability: A well-designed RFP compels providers to detail their functionality, pricing, timelines, and support model - helping you compare like-for-like.
Key areas your RFP should cover
Your RFP should go beyond a simple feature checklist and focus on the areas that will define a successful long-term partnership.
Start with product requirements — which parts of your payments and digital banking stack do you want to outsource, and which do you prefer to keep in-house? From e-money accounts to card program flexibility, clarity on scope will help vendors tailor their responses.
Here’re some useful questions to include:
- Can I specify limits on the transactions?
- Do you offer a choice of shared or dedicated sort code?
- Are you allowing a KYC delegation model?
Equally critical are compliance and security. In a highly regulated environment, you’ll want to understand how a provider manages Consumer Duty obligations, regulatory reporting, and their approach to evolving compliance needs.
A few important points to include in your RFP:
- Describe how your platform supports the industry standards (such as ISO20022)
- Can you describe your Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) and Business Continuity Plan (BCP) policies?
- What fraud monitoring service / tools do you have in place?
On the technical architecture side, assess the platform’s scalability, uptime guarantees, and API flexibility, since these determine how seamlessly the solution will integrate into your existing tech stack.
These are some key questions to consider:
- What Service Level Agreements (SLA)s do you offer for the proposed solution? E.g., Availability, Extensibility, Performance, Bandwidth/Latency etc.
- Does your solution support real-time event-driven architecture?
- Provide your approach for providing Test / Quality / Staging environments
Don’t forget service operations either: clarify responsibilities for KYC, AML, and sanctions screening, and confirm what level of ongoing support the vendor provides to both you and your end customers.
Some questions we recommend considering:
- Describe the support hours (24x7, 24x5, etc.)
- What is your approach to customer management? For example, if there is an issue with a customer’s account?
- Does your solution have a dashboard which can be configured for different departments?
Finally, explore providers’ implementation approach — including project timelines, testing processes, and migration support to ensure smooth onboarding and go-live — and round it out with clear expectations on pricing and commercials. Looking beyond upfront costs can help avoid unwelcome surprises down the line.
A few critical questions to include in your RFP are:
- What are the main steps of the onboarding process and estimated duration of each step?
- Is the system fully testable in UAT?
- What's the support provided during the migration phase?
As Chris Bassett, Head of Procurement at Edenred Payment Solutions, puts it:
“An effective RFP process gives a business the structure and clarity they need to make complex decisions with confidence. By setting clear expectations, aligning stakeholders and requirements early, and maintaining transparency throughout; businesses ensure they’re evaluating suppliers on a truly level playing field. Ultimately, a robust RFP is about more than testing the market, compliance and due diligence - it’s about laying the foundations for successful, scalable and sustainable supplier relationships."
At Edenred Payment Solutions, we’ve helped enterprises navigate this journey. Our experience means we’ve seen best practices in action, and we know how to help you avoid the pitfalls.
The enterprise-grade RFP to selecting the right BaaS partner
To help you and your team streamline the vendor selection process, we’ve created a free, practical RFP template designed specifically for enterprises seeking a BaaS partner.
With the right structure and guidance, your RFP can be more than a procurement exercise - it can be a strategic step toward unlocking new product and market growth opportunities.
Best practices for issuing a BaaS RFP
During the last 20+ years, we’ve taken part in hundreds of RFPs and learnt the best practices that set enterprises up for success during the process:
- Provide clear guidelines: When issuing an RFP, clarity is everything. You should provide explicit guidelines on timelines, required formats, and evaluation stages to create a fair and efficient process, and so they can deliver responses that are easy to compare.
- Give vendors context: Provide enough context about your current setup and future needs to encourage accurate and tailored responses from potential partners.
- Centralise communication: To keep the process transparent, appoint a single point of contact for all communication and ensure clarifications are shared with every vendor.
- Manage internal stakeholders: Don’t overlook your own internal stakeholders. Setting expectations, blocking time in calendars, and keeping everyone involved up to date helps to stay aligned and avoid delays.
- Document everything: Document all communication in writing to maintain an audit trail that can stand up to regulatory scrutiny.
Final thoughts
Choosing the right BaaS partner will influence your organisation’s ability to innovate, remain compliant, and scale with confidence. A well-structured RFP provides the discipline and transparency needed to make that choice effectively, but it also creates an opportunity: to align internal stakeholders, clarify your long-term vision, and establish the foundation for a successful partnership.
At Edenred Payment Solutions, we’ve seen firsthand how a thoughtful approach to the RFP process can transform outcomes. Having been through this journey many times, we understand the nuances that matter most to enterprises - from regulatory assurance to seamless implementation. Our goal is to share that experience, helping you move through vendor selection with clarity and confidence.
Get the customisable RFP template for BaaS partners
If you’re preparing to launch your own RFP, our free template is designed to streamline the process, reduce uncertainty, and ensure you’re asking the right questions.
