Sep 29, 2026 · 24 min · 10 segments
Most bank and credit union RFPs read like checklists, and checklists produce generic, unusable answers. Phil Marion, who leads Q2's proposal team and reviews about 10,000 RFP questions a month…
Phil MarionGuest
Sheryl BrownHost
So tell me, what does a typical work week look like when you're that close to the RFP process?
It's a healthy balance of a lot of reading, a lot of reviewing, and a lot of self-education for me and my team.
And my goal is to keep everyone on the team as educated as possible to a quickly and dynamically changing environment that we're in.
What's the scope? How many questions? What do they need? Because early in my career, I was a one-person team.
How do I keep a whole team full of people educated as if we share some type of general knowledge between us? That's the challenge, everybody.
So what are some of the most common mistakes you see banks and credit unions make when they're writing their request for proposal?
I always like to say this for folks that haven't worked in RFPs, is that there is really no way to predict what you're going to see when you open an RFP.
I thought I had seen every format under the sun, but there's always another one.
There's Word, there's Excel, there's portals, there are embedded documents and tables.
There's so much focus being put on the format of the RFP whether it's endless checklists or kind of kitchen sinking, that I think very often the banks and credit unions may be not differentiating themselves from the get-go.
And so what I would say often to folks is like, look, you're trying to make a driveway, not a maze.
The harder you make it on yourself and the harder you make it on the vendors, the more difficult it will be to actually review this thing.
So tell me, what does a typical work week look like when you're that close to the RFP process?
It's a healthy balance of a lot of reading, a lot of reviewing, and a lot of self-education for me and my team.
And my goal is to keep everyone on the team as educated as possible to a quickly and dynamically changing environment that we're in.
What's the scope? How many questions? What do they need? Because early in my career, I was a one-person team.
How do I keep a whole team full of people educated as if we share some type of general knowledge between us? That's the challenge, everybody.
So what are some of the most common mistakes you see banks and credit unions make when they're writing their request for proposal?
I always like to say this for folks that haven't worked in RFPs, is that there is really no way to predict what you're going to see when you open an RFP.
I thought I had seen every format under the sun, but there's always another one.
There's Word, there's Excel, there's portals, there are embedded documents and tables.
There's so much focus being put on the format of the RFP whether it's endless checklists or kind of kitchen sinking, that I think very often the banks and credit unions may be not differentiating themselves from the get-go.
And so what I would say often to folks is like, look, you're trying to make a driveway, not a maze.
The harder you make it on yourself and the harder you make it on the vendors, the more difficult it will be to actually review this thing.
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