How leading banks are institutionalising vendor selection to improve speed, safety, and strategic fit
As financial institutions accelerate their digital transformation agendas, many are discovering that the real bottleneck isn’t the technology – it’s the evaluation process.
Vendor selection remains one of the most manual, fragmented, and under-optimised functions across the bank. RFPs lack clarity on integration feasibility. Product demos miss real-world constraints. Risk and compliance are looped in too late. And PoCs often fail to scale – not due to capability shortfalls, but because critical due diligence steps were skipped or siloed.
Forward-leaning banks are solving this by turning evaluation into infrastructure
With NayaOne, institutions are formalising how they assess, compare, and progress fintech partners – creating an internal capability that mirrors the standards applied to credit, capital, and operational risk decisions.
But before you test anything, you need alignment on one fundamental question:
What’s the Cost of Choosing the Wrong Vendor?
Vendor relationships underpin everything from customer experience to compliance posture; a misstep can be more than a procurement error – it can be a material business risk.
The real costs include:
- Operational disruption due to failed integrations or performance gaps
- Regulatory exposure from vendors that don’t meet control expectations
- Reputational damage if service delivery breaks downstream
- Opportunity cost of time wasted on non-viable vendors
- Internal fatigue from repeated failed PoCs or stalled pilots
In short: when vendor selection is based on assumption, not evidence, the bank pays for it later – in remediation work, strained partnerships, and missed innovation windows.
The antidote isn’t more due diligence. It’s better infrastructure for decision-making.
Getting to a Bankable Evaluation: Five Strategic Questions
Before initiating any vendor assessment, top-performing banks are aligning stakeholders around a shared set of objectives, data, and outcomes. That alignment begins by answering:
1. What is the defined business objective or pain point?
Are we trying to improve claims resolution time, reduce false positives in fraud alerts, or accelerate vendor due diligence? Evaluations without a quantifiable goal rarely yield investment-grade decisions.
2. What constitutes a successful outcome?
Are we measuring time-to-integrate, output precision, policy alignment, or operational uplift? Target metrics must be established early to ensure traceability and executive sign-off.
3. What architecture and control frameworks must the solution work within?
If the solution cannot interoperate with existing data policies, authentication layers, or infrastructure dependencies, it will never make it past InfoSec review. Define non-negotiables up front.
4. Who are the critical internal approvers?
Without early engagement from risk, compliance, procurement, and the lines of business, evaluations stall in committee or face rejection at handoff. Bring the right stakeholders in from the outset.
5. What is the downstream pathway post-evaluation?
Will the evaluation lead to a structured pilot, direct integration, or an investment decision? A clear path to production ensures stakeholder investment and resource prioritisation.
Who Needs to Be at the Table?
A truly institutionalised evaluation process involves the following roles, each mapped to a specific function in the decision lifecycle:
| Function | Responsibility |
|---|---|
| Business Sponsor / Product Owner | Owns the use case and business KPI definition |
| Enterprise Architecture / Technology | Assesses integration feasibility and scalability |
| Risk & Compliance | Validates regulatory alignment and control coverage |
| Procurement / Vendor Management | Manages third-party risk and onboarding processes |
| Innovation / Strategy Office | Oversees framework consistency and alignment with broader transformation agenda |
Case Example: Accelerating IVD Onboarding
A global universal bank recently used NayaOne to evaluate three Intelligent Vendor Discovery (IVD) platforms aimed at reducing onboarding timelines for new fintech partners. Rather than relying on marketing collateral and static questionnaires, the bank spun up a sandbox mirroring its third-party risk processes and required documentation workflows.
Each solution was assessed against:
- Full audit trails of all test activity and data interactions
- Customisable control frameworks aligned with internal risk policies
- Environment isolation to prevent data leakage or policy breaches
- Centralised dashboards for multi-stakeholder review and executive reporting
Within five weeks, the team reached consensus on a preferred vendor – with full traceability, logged results, and minimal disruption to BAU teams. What previously took six months in fragmented reviews was completed with confidence in under two.
Designed for Governance and Scale
NayaOne supports the level of oversight required by major financial institutions:
- Full audit trails of all test activity and data interactions
- Customisable control frameworks aligned with internal risk policies
- Environment isolation to prevent data leakage or policy breaches
- Centralised dashboards for multi-stakeholder review and executive reporting
This enables risk, compliance, and IT to participate in innovation decisions—not as blockers, but as active partners.
Building a Repeatable, Enterprise-Grade Evaluation Function
When treated as a system – not a series of exceptions – evaluation becomes a competitive advantage. Banks that industrialise this capability benefit from:
- Shortened time-to-decision
- Greater stakeholder alignment
- Higher throughput of viable fintech integrations
- Improved transparency in vendor risk assessments
- Clearer ROI tracking on innovation initiatives
It’s no longer enough to find promising vendors. The differentiator is the ability to evaluate them quickly, rigorously, and in a way that earns internal trust.
Up Next: Your Evaluation Roadmap
In our next piece, we’ll outline how to stand up a repeatable vendor evaluation capability inside your bank, including:
- How to prioritise and structure use cases
- Governance and data readiness considerations
- Building scoring frameworks for stakeholder alignment
- Integrating the evaluation function into procurement and risk ops
Because in a world where the right partner can determine your next market advantage, how you evaluate is just as critical as who you choose.
