I have spent over 20 years in platform and product engineering, responding to over 1,000 RFPs. And I’ve seen the industry morph dramatically. But never as fast, or as fundamentally, as in the last three years.

Today’s banking financial services and fintech clients are not just transforming their tech; they’re rewriting what they expect from their partners. 

Cost arbitrage and headcount no longer win deals. Value creation does. 

From my perspective, here are five shifts shaping customer priorities. And here’s what they really mean for technology partners and vendors like Xoriant.

The Five Fault Lines of Change

From cost arbitrage to value architecture: Clients no longer want just vendors. They want partners who understand their business levers and co-create platforms that unlock growth. So, we are moving from “delivering hours” to “delivering impact.”

In a recent McKinsey report (March 2024), 45% of BFS firms admitted they regretted choosing low-cost vendors who failed to deliver lasting results. The cost was easy to justify but expensive to fix. The shift is clear: clients want impact they can measure. And maybe this is why a mid-sized digital bank chose us not for the lowest bid, but because we reduced their onboarding cycle by 40%, directly boosting user conversion. Another, a scaling fintech, partnered with us to shrink their product backlog and accelerate the integration of their payment solution, significantly improving time-to-value and deployment velocity.

From delivery speed to innovation speed: Gone are the days when success was measured by how fast we shipped. Today, it’s about how quickly our clients can experiment, iterate, and scale new digital financial products—especially those embedded with AI. A wealth-tech firm we support uses our AI accelerator to test product variants in days rather than weeks. For them, time-to-feedback is more valuable than time-to-code. 

For a leading financial fraud compliance platform, we helped transition from a licensed database to an open-source alternative, saving them $7 million in implementation costs while maintaining performance and compliance benchmarks.

From legacy modernization to modular evolution: Modernization is no longer just a tech refresh; it’s more a surgical upgrade. Clients want modular, cloud-native architectures that don't break the business. Security and compliance aren’t afterthoughts; they are built in from Day 1. One global bank we work with is layering cloud-native services on top of COBOL systems—ensuring progress without disruption.

From compliance burden to strategic edge:Compliance used to be a checkbox. Today, it’s a competitive advantage. Clients want partners who understand regulatory nuance and can embed it directly into platforms, turning risk into resilience. We helped a client auto-convert U.S. Fed directives into executable compliance rules using GenAI. What once was seen as innovation is now considered table stakes.

From AI curiosity to AI as default: Every BFS conversation now includes AI—not as a novelty, but as a necessity. Whether it’s fraud detection, hyper-personalization, or developer productivity, AI is expected in the technology stack. Clients now demand GenAI-powered support, testing, document extraction, and insights. If you're not offering production-ready use cases, you are not even in the conversation. McKinsey’s 2024 study showed that 72% of CIOs now prioritize AI maturity and regulatory fluency over cost when selecting partners. The buyers have evolved—but many vendors have not.

Five Things Clients Are Really Asking

Deep domain + regulatory expertise:  BFS and fintech clients seek technologists who understand Basel III, PSD2, and evolving digital lending norms and not just Kubernetes or Kafka. The era of ‘pure tech shops’ is over. Today’s conversations map regulatory frameworks directly into system logic and decision flows.

Engineering with AI at the core: Clients expect partners with field-tested, domain-specific AI solutions. This includes GenAI-powered development acceleration, AI-enhanced IT operations, fraud detection, and intelligent document processing. For fintechs, it often means AI-driven credit scoring, customer support automation, and embedded intelligence in financial journeys.

From GenAI-powered development acceleration to AI-enhanced IT operations, fraud detection, and intelligent document processing—clients expect partners with field-tested, domain-specific AI solutions. For fintechs, this includes AI-driven credit scoring, customer support automation, and embedded intelligence in financial journeys.

New-age commercial models: Clients increasingly favor risk-sharing, outcome-based, and performance-led models. For fintechs, this often translates to milestone-based pricing tied to user growth, feature adoption, or platform uptime. They reward partners who are genuinely invested in their success—not just the SOW.

Seamless, non-disruptive modernization: Clients want change, but not chaos. Whether it’s cloud migration for a digital bank or re-platforming a FinTech’s core system, they expect zero business downtime and full compliance with regulatory and data privacy requirements. Upgrade without breaking things—that’s where conversions are happening.

Velocity with control: Fintechs crave rapid product iteration but need it with guardrails. Whether piloting a new lending product or launching an embedded finance offering, they want the agility of a startup with the rigor of an enterprise-grade partner.

The Vendor Reboot: What Needs to Change

Many vendors still offer old wine in new bottles, fancy decks, and the same delivery models. That approach will not survive this new landscape. At Xoriant, we’ve taken a different path. Our move toward engineering software-defined businesses is about helping BFS and fintech clients build scalable, compliant, AI-ready platforms faster and smarter. We have embedded AI at the heart of everything we do, from document summarization and rule automation to secure, compliant DevSecOps pipelines.

Are You Still Buying or Selling the Old Way?

The BFS renaissance is here. It’s time for vendors to rise to the occasion with domain fluency, AI depth, and commercial courage.

If you're a BFS or a fintech leader rethinking your tech partnerships or a vendor reevaluating your relevance, ask yourself:

• Are we building platforms that scale? 
• Are we embedding AI where it matters? 
• Are we truly sharing risk and reward?

If not, it’s time to rethink. Because the next RFP won’t be won on cost, it’ll be won on conviction.