Choosing the right AML vendor: RFP criteria that matter

In today’s increasingly varied and competitive financial landscape, choosing the right anti-money laundering (AML) solution is critical. To successfully turn compliance into a driver of growth, partnering with a vendor that fits your business model, markets, customers, and business strategy is essential. 

The request for proposal (RFP) process is therefore a vital but complex part of your compliance strategy. This article explores the RFP process and guides you to an RFP that will allow you to choose the right AML vendor for your firm. 

What is an RFP for an AML solution?

An RFP is a document outlining your organization’s needs for a particular project and inviting responses from vendors. In an AML context, an RFP will describe your compliance and business requirements, allowing you to assess which AML software vendor best suits your business. 

Understanding the role of an RFP in selecting an AML solution

For financial institutions (FIs), an RFP is more than just a formality in the procurement process. A structured, well-designed RFP can be an important strategic tool for evaluating AML solutions, helping you contextualize your compliance obligations within your overall business strategy and choose the right technology to help you achieve your compliance and commercial goals. 

Why creating an effective RFP for an AML solution is crucial 

Choosing the wrong AML vendor can be disastrous for FIs, resulting in inefficient workflows, wasted compliance spend, and regulatory exposure. An RFP is crucial in avoiding these consequences by specifying your requirements and defining your evaluation criteria. Specifically, an effective RFP for an AML solution will allow you to: 

• Ensure regulatory compliance: A specialist AML solution able to demonstrate robust compliance with all relevant financial crime rules relevant to you will help you pass regulatory reviews and build trust with regulators. 
• Drive efficiency in your compliance function: Given the high cost and long timelines of building a solution in-house, an RFP lets you fulfill your compliance goals quickly and efficiently by giving you the information you need to select a vendor. 
• Achieve growth goals: An RFP can structure your assessment of how compatible a vendor is with your business objectives, ultimately enabling you to choose a provider that can grow with you. 
• Minimize vendor risk: When partnering with vendors and third-party suppliers, you need to assess your exposure to financial, operational, security, and regulatory risks. A successful RFP will allow you to identify any issues with a vendor before beginning a business relationship.  

What are the key components of an AML solution RFP?

A comprehensive, strategic RFP should cover the following core elements: 

• Compliance and business objectives: Your RFP should proceed from your organization’s specific aims. For example, do you need to clear an alert backlog, adjust to new regulatory guidance, reduce your cost of compliance, or prepare for business expansion? You should also understand how you will measure the success of your solution. 
• Technical and organizational requirements: There is no one-size-fits-all solution for AML compliance. The shape of your compliance program depends on your industry, location, and regulatory obligations, and your RFP should include the capabilities – such as flexible transaction monitoring thresholds, automated customer screening and ongoing monitoring, real-time payment screening, or AI-assisted case management – you need. 
• Cost structure: Request transparency around pricing models and total cost of ownership – including implementation, scaling, and ongoing support . 
• Vendor support: Given the importance of dedicated support from your chosen vendor when implementing and refining your AML solution, you should find out how these processes work and set expectations for a service-level agreement (SLA). 

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Critical questions to ask vendors

To get the most value from your RFP, make it as specific, detailed, and relevant to your priorities as possible. These are some of the questions you can ask vendors to understand their solutions and their suitability: 

Technology features

• What are your solution’s automation capabilities across screening, monitoring, and case management? 
• How do you ensure your solution produces accurate and reliable results?  
• What types of configurability does your platform offer, to accommodate differing risk-based approaches?
• Does your solution include regulatory reporting capabilities? 
• How does your platform leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to reduce false positives while maintaining detection accuracy? 
• How does your platform handle processing of high-volume transactions while maintaining sub-second response times? 
• Beyond basic name matching, what sophisticated entity resolution capabilities does your platform offer? 
• How does your platform use predictive analytics to prioritize cases and allocate investigative resources based on risk severity? 

Regulatory alignment 

• How does your solution support compliance with relevant AML regulations? 
• Can you provide documentation to support explainability?  
• What challenges do you anticipate we might have in demonstrating explainability to regulators? 
• What event log and audit trail capabilities do you provide? 
• What is your model risk management framework? 
• Has your solution been developed by financial crime specialists as well as technology specialists? 

Data 

• How do you source your AML risk data? 
• How frequently is your data refreshed? 
• What measures do you take to ensure data quality and integrity? 
• Is your solution compliant with local data security and privacy standards and rules? 
• What is your approach to handling unstructured data sources, such as news articles and regulatory updates?
• How does your platform automatically incorporate data updates, such as new sanctions listings or politically exposed person (PEP) changes, without requiring manual intervention or system downtime? 

Implementation  

• What integration capabilities does your solution have? 
• What will the impact on my existing tech stack be?
• How long is the implementation process likely to take for an organization of our size? 

Ongoing support 

• What is your process for handling incidents or support tickets? 
• How do you prioritize tickets, and how soon can I expect a response? 
• How will your solution cope with increased customer and transaction volumes? 
• What training will my compliance team need to use this software, and how do you provide this? 
• What changes and upgrades to your solution do you expect to offer in the short, medium, and long term? 

How to evaluate responses to your RFP for an AML solution

Once you have received responses to your RFP, your evaluation of them should take place according to a consistent, systematic process with these steps: 

1. Weight your categories: The criteria outlined in your RFP should be weighted according to their importance. For example, if flexible rulesets are more of a priority than fast implementation, this should be reflected in your weighting and scoring. 
2. Score vendors: Apply the same scoring matrix to each response, taking these weightings into account. 
3. Shortlist vendors: Based on these results, you can then shortlist the highest-scoring vendors before asking for additional product demos and testimonials from customers in similar industries to validate their claims. At this stage, you can also risk-assess vendors to anticipate any issues a partnership may cause. 

“We evaluated quite a few vendors on several parameters. Obviously, on their capabilities within the actual results of monitoring and screening, but also on workflow, UI, data dashboards, data handling, and cost per transaction. ComplyAdvantage won in most, if not all, parameters.” 

Lukas Andersen, MLRO and Head of Financial Crime Risk, Inpay

Common pitfalls in the AML solution RFP process and how to avoid them

Treating the RFP process as paperwork or a box-ticking exercise, rather than a strategic initiative, can undermine your ability to build a scalable and effective compliance program. In particular, common faults with RFPs include: 

• Vague objectives and requirements: Without a clear understanding of your requirements, compliance and commercial goals, and KPIs to measure success, you will find it hard to develop a solution tailored to your needs. Your RFP should include specific criteria for success and concrete ways this will be measured. 
• Focusing too much on price: Tight budgets are a common challenge for compliance officers, and it can be tempting to look solely at cost when deciding on a new solution. However, a cheap solution that fails to reduce manual workloads for your team or has to be replaced soon after implementation adds up to a waste of resources. In the long run, a solution’s efficiency and precise fit with your needs are better indicators of value for money than implementation cost alone. 
• Overlooking support and scalability: For both operational and financial reasons, it is essential that your AML solution can grow with you with a modular, scalable implementation. Otherwise, you risk slowing growth by onboarding new solutions regularly or hitting a ceiling with your compliance capabilities. Ongoing support from your AML vendor can help you resolve tech or operational issues while fine-tuning your system over time for maximum efficiency. 
• Ignoring future products: In the last few years alone, technological innovations have transformed financial crime compliance, with the arrival of agentic AI being the latest example. Rather than treating a solution as static, try to understand a vendor’s plans for future product releases and build these into your tech roadmap, allowing you to continually optimize your AML solution. 

Kick-start your AML solution RFP process with ComplyAdvantage

Creating an effective AML compliance program depends on finding a software solution that can support a combination of tech innovation, operational efficiency, and robust compliance across your organization. 

ComplyAdvantage’s AI-powered AML solutions go beyond meeting essential RFP criteria – they’re engineered to empower firms with innovative, reliable, and scalable compliance capabilities, including:

• Agentic AI and machine learning capabilities: We leverage cutting-edge AI and ML technologies, including agentic AI, across key AML processes like transaction monitoring, customer screening, and ongoing monitoring. 
• Market-leading proprietary risk data: Rather than relying on other providers, we source our own data across key categories like sanctions, watchlists, adverse media, and PEPs. Our data is refreshed in real-time to eliminate delays in compliance. 
• Enhanced explainability: Our approach to AI combines innovation with transparency. Our solutions automatically store documents and case records to create clear, accessible audit trails. Our model risk management framework is based on key regulations, such as the EU AI Act and GDPR, and guidance from institutions like the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Bank of England, and the New York Department of Financial Services.