The financial services industry is undergoing a fundamental shift in how it delivers innovation. As banks and insurers confront accelerating digital demands, the delivery of external technology – not just its discovery – has emerged as the primary constraint on transformation.
While fintech investment reached $113 billion globally in 2023 (Source: CB Insights), the vast majority of banks report long cycles and inconsistent results when onboarding third-party vendors. Many innovation initiatives stall after proof-of-concept (PoC), or worse, enter production with solutions that were never properly validated.
This growing execution gap is driving the emergence of a new category: Vendor Delivery Infrastructure (VDI).
The Vendor Problem Isn’t Discovery - It’s Delivery
Most institutions are not short on fintech partners. What they lack is the infrastructure to consistently validate, de-risk, and deliver those vendors across business units. Consider the following:
- Over 70% of PoCs never reach production, due to integration issues, compliance failures, or unclear business fit (BCG 2024).
- Vendor onboarding timelines exceed 6 months on average, even for short-cycle use cases (Finextra Research).
- Multiple internal teams (e.g. risk, security, architecture, legal) get involved each time a new tool is trialled - creating repeat overhead for every test.
As a result, many financial institutions are stuck in a cycle of unscalable vendor management, where every PoC is bespoke and delivery is slow, costly, and unpredictable.
What Is Vendor Delivery Infrastructure?
VDI is the execution layer that enables banks and insurers to discover, evaluate, and deliver third-party technologies with speed, structure, and control.
It combines five core capabilities:
- Vendor orchestration: pre-vetted access to internal and external tecnology solution providers
- Testing environments: pre-integrated infrastructure to run PoCs in days, not months
- Synthetic data assets: production-like data without the regulatory risks
- Governance tooling: audit trails, policy enforcement, and compliance alignment
- Insights and reporting: structured outputs to inform build/buy decisions
VDI is not a workflow tool. It is infrastructure – designed to systematise a process that has historically been fragmented, manual, and risk-prone.
Why VDI Matters Now
Three structural shifts are accelerating the need for VDI:
1. The Rise of GenAI and Unstructured Vendor Growth
With the emergence of generative AI, the volume and volatility of external tools has surged. Institutions need a way to quickly test for IP risk, model drift, and control gaps – before these tools make it into production environments.
2. Regulatory Expectations Around Third-Party Risk
Supervisory authorities globally – from the FCA and EBA to the Saudi SAMA and MAS – are increasing scrutiny on outsourcing, model governance, and critical third parties. Structured pre-onboarding validation is rapidly becoming a regulatory expectation.
3. Enterprise Strategy Shifting from RFIs to Proof
There is growing consensus that strategy is no longer a PowerPoint problem – it’s an execution one. VDI enables organisations to test vendor performance under realistic conditions before committing resources, reducing the risk of post-onboarding failure.
The Opportunity
For digital leaders, VDI offers a new lever to reduce time-to-value, lower onboarding costs, and improve vendor fit. For CIOs and Heads of Risk, it provides auditability, control, and assurance. And for regulators, it demonstrates structured oversight of innovation delivery.
Institutions that embrace Vendor Delivery Infrastructure now will be better positioned to navigate the next wave of technological change – not just by finding the right tools, but by delivering them effectively.
Explore how VDI works in practice
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