Most procurement teams approach a payments orchestration RFP the same way they’d approach any other supplier selection. Build a question set, send it out, allow two weeks for responses, shortlist, demo, and decide. Six to eight weeks, start to finish.
It doesn’t work.
We spoke recently with Mark McMurtrie, Director at Payments Consultancy and an ambassador for the Payments Association, who has spent his career on both sides of these processes. He was clear about why short timelines fail. “It’s not days, it’s not weeks,” he told us. “It is months. Between two and a half months and four months in elapsed time.”
That sounds long, but it isn’t. Here’s what those four months actually need to cover.
The work doesn’t begin with the RFP being sent. It begins with the organisation getting clear on what it’s trying to achieve.
Weeks 1–3: Objectives and internal alignment. This is the most overlooked phase, and the one that quietly determines everything downstream. Three questions need answering before a single supplier is contacted. What pain are you actually trying to solve? Are you keeping your current acquirer or replacing them? What does success look like in twelve months: cost reduction, international expansion, or a better customer experience? Mark is emphatic on this: pick one. Organisations that walk in saying “all three, equally” end up choosing on price.
Weeks 3–5: Documentation and supplier longlist. Score sheets get prepared. The internal benchmark- what payments actually cost today, by transaction, by acquirer, by market- gets pulled together. The longlist gets built. For orchestration specifically, that means more than just incumbents. Orchestration is new territory; the people who should respond may not yet be in your existing supplier folders.
Weeks 5–9: Supplier response window. The supplier-side mistake most procurement teams make is squeezing this. Mark again: “There’s no point in spending a month internally pre-working on the questions, objectives and things, and then expecting the suppliers to respond in a week.” Serious orchestration responses run to dozens of pages. Compressing the response window invites shortcuts on the supplier side that look fine on paper and bite during implementation.
Weeks 9–12: Shortlist, deep-dives, due diligence. Two or three suppliers get invited to demo. References get checked. Mark recommends in-person reference visits where possible, with no supplier in the room. Contractual clauses get reviewed. SLAs, escalation paths, and service credits all get walked through.
Weeks 12–14: Final negotiation and award. The pencil-sharpening, the final terms, the executive sign-off. Quiet, important, hard to shortcut.
That’s three to three and a half months on the inside. Four if your organisation is complex or your scope is broad.
The timeline above assumes you start the RFP knowing who to send it to. For payments orchestration in 2026, that assumption is doing a lot of work.
Mark put it bluntly when we discussed the supplier perspective: “If you’ve had no conversation before receiving an RFP, you’ve made a mistake.”
He means it from both sides. Suppliers shortlisted from cold know they’re being included as a comparison point, not a serious contender. Procurement teams who haven’t had pre-RFP conversations have written a question set without the benefit of knowing what’s actually possible in the market, which means the questions tend to be either generic (everyone scores the same) or biased towards the incumbent’s existing capabilities.
The pre-engagement runs upstream of the formal timeline. Industry events, networking, briefing calls, and capability conversations. None of this lives in the RFP project plan, but all of it shapes whether the formal RFP produces a useful decision or a procedural one.
If you’re planning to issue an orchestration RFP in October, the right month to start pre-engagement conversations is May.
Mark’s strongest warning is about timeline slippage. “Extensions never help any party. All it does is just move the thing around.”
He’s right. Extensions sound generous to the supplier, but they break the rhythm of the process. Stakeholder calendars that were pre-booked drift. Internal sign-off windows that were aligned with quarterly board cycles miss them. Suppliers who organised their teams around the original deadline have to reorganise. The risk of the whole process losing momentum compounds.
The discipline is to set realistic dates from the start, including a realistic response time for suppliers, and then hold them.
That requires two things most RFPs skip. First, pre-booking the stakeholder time for response evaluation, shortlisting meetings, demo days, and final negotiation. Block out the diary entries when the timeline is published, not when the responses come in. Second, regular milestone communications to suppliers throughout the process. Keep all participants updated on where things stand, what’s coming next, and when their next moment of attention is required.
The RFP processes that produce good orchestration partners, not just good orchestration suppliers, share a few features.
They give themselves three to four months of elapsed time, and they protect it.
They spend the first three weeks getting clear on a single primary objective, not arguing about it across departments halfway through.
They start pre-engagement conversations months before the formal RFP, so the longlist is informed, and the question set reflects what’s actually buyable.
They allocate proper response time to suppliers. Four weeks minimum for orchestration, where the questions are technical and the answers run long.
They keep the milestone calendar visible to everyone involved. Internal stakeholders block the evaluation time when it’s published. Suppliers know when their next deadline is.
And they don’t extend.
A four-week RFP saves a few weeks at the start of a programme that will then run for fifteen years. A four-month RFP gives you a chance of getting those fifteen years right.
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