Selection Readiness is a three-week, fixed-scope start to a purchase you will live with for ten years. Requirements written from how your firm operates. The market scanned with the questions your own expert would not ask. The vendor you already prefer tested against two real alternatives. A shortlist of three, an evaluation frame agreed before any demo is seen, and the contract standard you hold every vendor to. If you want me to stay, I run the demos, references and negotiation to a signed contract as a separate engagement. No payment from any vendor on a purchase I advise on. Referral and advisory relationships with vendors are declared up front, and the full list is available on request.
Every vendor demos beautifully and you cannot tell them apart. Procurement has turned your problem into a feature checklist. Two of the three vendors in the room are there for compliance, and they know it. The references confirm rather than test, because the vendor chose them. The negotiation is one-sided: they anchor high, concede in a rehearsed sequence and hunt for your deadline, while you have no market data and no playbook. Then you sign a contract written by their lawyers, and in year three you find out what the exit costs.
Two things have been added to it. The vendor’s AI, which changes in a release and makes your firm the deployer in law; the contract has to say what it does with your data, when you are told it changed, and where a human can stop it. And the exit, which under DORA is a plan the regulator can ask for rather than a clause nobody reads. Vendors are consolidating too, so the platform you choose may not be run by the people you chose it from by the time the contract ends. The renewal is the only moment you have real power over any of it.
The clock starts when your pack arrives, not when the engagement is signed. What you cannot produce is itself the first finding.
A scoping call, then a one-page list of what I need: the current contracts and service levels, the incumbent’s performance record, any requirements written so far and any vendor already preferred, the process map for the function being served, the systems it connects to, the budget envelope, the decision makers and the date the decision has to be made. Your team gathers it; the three weeks begin when it lands.
The requirements written from how the firm operates, whatever the category, research and due diligence platforms, portfolio and order management, fund accounting, transfer agency, investor reporting, CRM, data or compliance, with the ten things that matter ranked and the rest listed as hygiene, so that a demo can be judged against your business rather than the vendor’s feature list. Where the firm already has a vendor in mind, that vendor is written into the frame as one candidate, not the answer.
Your subject matter expert knows the product. I ask the vendor the questions that decide the next ten years: who owns them and whether they are private equity backed or public, and what that means for the roadmap; whether the revenue is reinvested in the product or harvested; what the failover and resilience arrangements actually are; how it integrates with what you already run and what that costs; the average onboarding time for a firm your size, from signature to live; and where the AI in the product is going. The result is a plain view of each vendor’s direction, ownership and likely tenure, and the ecosystem of integrations each depends on.
A shortlist of three that are real, with the reason each is there, or the evidence that your preferred vendor is the right one. The evaluation frame, agreed before any demo is seen. The contract standard: AI clauses, exit and transition plan, service levels, change notification and data terms, ranked for this purchase. The reference protocol: who we ask, what we ask, what a good answer sounds like. And a short note for the executive committee.
A separate engagement, priced by stage; you can bring me in at any stage. Demos and sandbox trials eat the time, so they run to a script you set, with me in the room where you want me. Reference checks with references we choose. A recommendation report the board can read. The negotiation, with market data and the vendor’s playbook named in advance, because the first number sets the range and the first concession is never the last one available. The contract reviewed against the standard and signed. The service ends there.
After three weeks: the requirements as your firm would write them if it had the time, the market scan with the answers, the shortlist or the evidence for your preferred vendor, the evaluation frame, the contract standard you keep for every purchase after this one, and the executive note. After the cycle: a recommendation your board can defend and a contract you can live with for ten years.
It is not legal advice, though the contract standard is written knowing lawyers will read it. It ends at signature: it is not implementation or project management of the migration, and if you want a buyer’s representative through to go-live, that is a separate engagement on its own terms. I do not resell or integrate, and I do not advise a firm and a vendor on the same purchase. I hold referral and advisory relationships with a small number of vendors and the full list is available on request; any that is in the frame is declared before the shortlist is written, I take no fee from that vendor on the purchase, and the firm decides whether I continue.
Yes. The cycle is sold in stages and a firm joins at the stage it has reached. The first thing I do is check the requirements and the shortlist against how the firm operates, because that is where most later problems start.
Procurement should validate the commercial terms and manage contractual risk. The business should own the requirements and the choice. I work for the business side of that line, and procurement gets a better contract standard than it usually does.
Not on any purchase I advise on. I do not resell or integrate. I hold referral and advisory relationships with a small number of vendors, all declared up front and the full list available on request; where one is in the frame I take no fee from it on that purchase and the firm decides whether I continue.
The buyer’s chair for eighteen years, then the vendor’s. On a purchase, paid only by the buyer.
At HSBC Alternative Investments I built the vendor selection, contracting, service level and oversight methodology used for every third party across the alternatives business, ran the selection and two migrations onto third-party transfer agency platforms, and negotiated a key annual contract from 750,000 to 500,000 Swiss francs, over eighteen years in which assets grew from $200 million to $31.6 billion with zero FCA breaches. At ONYX Capital Group I ran the selection of the trade pricing and accounting platforms for a commodity market maker. I then held C-suite seats at Backstop Solutions and, as an affiliate, at Leo Regtech, building and selling the platforms firms like yours buy, so I know the vendor’s playbook from the inside: how your opportunity is scored before the first meeting, how the demo is staged, how the anchor is set and the concessions sequenced. Through the Vendor AI Oversight Review I write the AI due diligence questions and the contract clauses regulated firms now put to their vendors, so those terms arrive in the standard rather than as an afterthought at signature.
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