Advantage advises community banks and credit unions on the contracts that keep them running: core processing, credit and debit, ATM driving, PIN networks, card brands, digital banking. Its Contract Optimizer line handles renewals and net-new vendor selection alike. Ann King, Project Manager for Advantage, runs those projects end to end, building requirements, inviting and training vendors, managing the demo surveys, and compiling results for the client.
What's unique about Ann's perspective is that she came to the work from the other side of the table. "I was a proposal manager for seven or eight years, so I wrote RFPs on the vendor side. Having the background as a proposal manager and now the project manager, I understand how RFPs work, and how they should flow. Today I am now initiating them on behalf of our clients."
The contracts a bank can't walk away from
A core processing switch reaches every part of a financial institution. "That's what runs their business," King says. "If you're going to switch your core vendor, it affects your entire business, including your employees and your consumers." The conversion alone can run 18 months.
That weight sits behind every project they take on. Advantage had built a business line negotiating contracts and pricing, and moving into full multi-vendor RFPs on clients' behalf meant coordinating multiple vendors, a client's stakeholder group, and hundreds of requirements per project. "It would be a lot more difficult sending spreadsheets and emails back and forth for us to run those multi-vendor reviews," King says. The firm needed to first find the right RFP tool before committing to the service line, and they chose Olive.
One place, three parties
One of the main areas Olive replaced was the email thread and traditional file management tools. Project overview, the institution's goals, current solutions, pricing expectations, supporting documentation, all of it now stands up inside the project instead of circulating as attachments.
The clarifying-question thread is where that pays off hardest. Vendors ask inside the platform. The client and every other vendor can see the question, though not who asked it. "If we're getting asked the same question from five different vendors, they ask it in Olive, we answer it once, and everybody sees the answer," King says. "We're not spending time emailing five different vendors, which cuts down a lot of that touchpoint on our side and ensures we answer everyone consistently." In a regulated selection, answering every bidder identically is part of the record.
“It's really that one-stop shop through the whole RFP process that all three entities have access to, so our client, us as the consultant, and the vendors all stay in sync.”
The view from the receiving end
King spent most of her career answering RFPs rather than issuing them, and that history shapes what she notices.
"I have used other RFP project software in the industry that's a lot more complicated than Olive is," she says. "The other software is complicated from the user perspective, whereas Olive is very straightforward." Vendors respond directly in the platform or download the question set and re-upload it with their supporting material. Her verdict on the difference is personal: "I would like to have had that capability to respond within Olive when I was a proposal manager."
The feedback has come back unprompted. "We've gotten very positive feedback from the vendors we have included in the RFPs on how easy Olive is to use," King says. "There's a lot entailed through the entire RFP process, and answering questions is just the beginning of that."
From demo to decision in seven weeks
"We've made answering a 500-question RFP easy for the vendors, and we're making the output easy for our clients," King says. The output is where selection actually happens, and it rarely rests with one person. Several stakeholder groups sit through the demos at a financial institution, and they don't always come out agreeing on the same vendor.
After demos, Advantage sends survey instruments to those stakeholders and compiles the results into a single view of what each group preferred and how they ranked it.
"The option for us to send surveys to our clients afterwards has been invaluable. If you have a group of people leaning towards one vendor, but another group likes a different one, the surveys help put this together for them to make that ultimate decision," King says.
“When running an RFP project via Olive, typically the time frame from the beginning requirements to the end where we would be down-selecting is anywhere from six to seven weeks. Without Olive and the streamlined process that it provides, it would be double that.”
What each project leaves behind
Advantage now keeps standing templates for every line of business it handles, which means requirements and questions reach a new client quickly. Vendors carry a profile and a login across projects, so their history is already in place when they're invited to the next one. "If we are including the same four vendors in a new RFP project that have utilized Olive in the past, we can populate the new project with the answers that the vendor has already provided," King says.
For King, what that adds up to comes back to what she knows from both sides of the process.
“RFPs are not always looked upon as the greatest things, whether you're initiating them or responding to them. But to have software that's easy to use is very important.”
