All 150 questions in our request-for-proposal bank, grouped by section, with what each section establishes, where the questions come from, what a weak answer looks like, and a suggested weighting for a hedge fund.
Editorial — Buyside Fintech's annotation
Where these questions come from. The bank is assembled from published institutional practice rather than written from scratch, so a vendor meeting it is answering the same ground it would face from a large investor.
| Source | Questions |
|---|---|
| Minnesota State Board of Investment RFP 2022 (published public record) | 66 |
| Buy-side operating practice | 24 |
| Shared Assessments SIG risk domains | 21 |
| AI vendor due diligence practice 2026 | 18 |
| Fund administrator selection practice | 10 |
| AIMA illustrative DDQ family | 6 |
| Operational due diligence practice (ODD) | 5 |
Every question carries a base weight from 1 to 5, set for a general buyer. The hedge fund column applies a multiplier to each section and rounds, capped at 5.
The multiplier is per SECTION, not per question, because what separates one buyer from another is which areas matter, not which individual questions. A hedge fund weights function, commercial terms, data and support above a general buyer, and each section below states why in one sentence.
These are a starting point to argue with. The weights a firm should actually use come out of the disagreement between the people who will live with the system. If nobody argued about them, they were not considered.
What this is not. It is not procurement advice, and no weighting here reflects your firm's circumstances. A high score means a vendor answered the questions we happened to ask, weighted the way we happened to weight them. It does not mean the product is right for you, and the comparison is only ever as good as the answers vendors gave.
Whether this vendor will still exist, still be independent, and still be investing in the product at the end of the horizon you are buying for.
As a due diligence questionCore due-diligence ground. An operational due diligence review of your fund will ask you the same questions about your critical vendors, so the answers here go straight into your own DDQ responses to investors.
What a weak answer looks likeOwnership described vaguely, or a refusal to discuss funding and profitability. A vendor that will not say who owns it is telling you something.
Hedge fund weighting — multiplier 1Matters as much to a hedge fund as to anyone. Not raised, because a fund can switch a system faster than an insurer can.
| Question | Answer | Base weight | Hedge fund |
|---|---|---|---|
| In what year did the company begin trading? | number Required | 2 | 2 |
| How many people does the company employ in total? | number Required | 2 | 2 |
| How many of those work on the product being proposed? | number Required | 4 | 4 |
| How many work on it in engineering, as opposed to sales or support? A large headcount with a small engineering share explains a slow roadmap. | number Required | 3 | 3 |
| Is the company profitable on its most recent full financial year? | boolean Required | 4 | 4 |
| Will you supply audited financial statements under the confidentiality terms of this RFP? | boolean Required | 3 | 3 |
| What is the ownership structure? | single select Required | 4 | 4 |
| Name the ultimate parent company, if any. | short text Optional | 3 | 3 |
| Has ownership, control or corporate structure changed in the last three years? | boolean Required | 4 | 4 |
| If it has, describe what changed and what it meant for clients. | long text Optional | 3 | 3 |
| Is a sale, listing or capital raise currently in progress or contemplated? A change of control mid-contract changes the roadmap, the support team and the price. | boolean Required | 4 | 4 |
| How many months of operating runway do you hold at the current rate of spend? Asked of vendors that are not yet profitable. A blank answer is itself informative. | number Optional | 3 | 3 |
| Is there any settled or ongoing litigation against the company from the last three years that a client should know about? | boolean Required | 4 | 4 |
| If so, summarise it. | long text Optional | 2 | 2 |
| In which countries do you have offices that serve clients? | multi select Required | 2 | 2 |
| Which financial regulators, if any, is the company itself registered with? | short text Optional | 3 | 3 |
Whether the product is used in production by firms resembling yours, and whether those firms stay.
As a due diligence questionReference checking is standard DDQ practice. Losses and the reason for them are the questions with real information in them.
What a weak answer looks likeClient counts without segmentation, or references only from firms ten times your size. A system built for a fifty-billion manager rarely fits a five-hundred-million fund.
Hedge fund weighting — multiplier 1.2Raised. Hedge funds are a minority of most vendors' books, and a product with two hundred long-only clients and four hedge funds will have been built around someone else's problems.
| Question | Answer | Base weight | Hedge fund |
|---|---|---|---|
| How many client firms use this product in production today? | number Required | 5 | 5 |
| How many of those are of a similar type to our firm? | number Required | 5 | 5 |
| How many are within our assets-under-management band? Size fit decides more failed implementations than feature lists do. | number Required | 5 | 5 |
| What are the assets under management of your largest and smallest clients on this product? | short text Required | 3 | 4 |
| How long has your longest-tenured client been on the product? | number Required | 3 | 4 |
| How many clients did you gain in each of the last three years? | short text Required | 3 | 4 |
| How many clients did you LOSE in each of the last three years? Asked separately from gains on purpose. Attrition is the number vendors present least willingly and it predicts most. | short text Required | 5 | 5 |
| What proportion of clients have left in the past three years, and why? | long text Required | 4 | 5 |
| How many client migrations onto this product have you completed in the past three years? Distinguishes a vendor that has done this from one that has sold it. | number Required | 4 | 5 |
| How many implementations begun in the last three years were abandoned before go-live? | number Required | 5 | 5 |
| Will you provide at least three references at firms of comparable type and size? | boolean Required | 5 | 5 |
| Will you introduce us to a client who left, or who ran a migration that went badly? A yes here is rare and tells you a great deal. | boolean Required | 3 | 4 |
Who will actually service you, how experienced they are, and whether they stay.
As a due diligence questionKey-person risk is a standard ODD question and applies to a critical vendor as much as to a manager.
What a weak answer looks likeHeadcount without turnover. Turnover on the servicing team is the number that predicts your experience in year two.
Hedge fund weighting — multiplier 1.1Slightly raised. A small fund gets a small share of attention, so who specifically is assigned matters more than at scale.
| Question | Answer | Base weight | Hedge fund |
|---|---|---|---|
| What was staff turnover on the client-servicing team in each of the last three years, as a percentage? | short text Required | 5 | 5 |
| Will we have a named account manager? | boolean Required | 4 | 4 |
| Can we meet the actual servicing team before signing? | boolean Required | 4 | 4 |
| Is the servicing team dedicated to us or shared across clients? | single select Required | 4 | 4 |
| How many client relationships does one servicing person typically carry? | number Required | 4 | 4 |
| In which locations and time zones is the servicing team based? | multi select Required | 3 | 3 |
| Is any part of support or operations subcontracted or offshored to a third party? | boolean Required | 4 | 4 |
| Do the people who implement the system stay with the account afterwards? A common and expensive surprise: the capable implementation team hands over to a different team on go-live. | boolean Required | 4 | 4 |
| What happens to our service if the lead people on our account leave? | long text Required | 3 | 3 |
Whether the product does what you need, in production, for the instruments and markets you actually trade.
As a due diligence questionNot a DDQ area — this is the RFP proper.
What a weak answer looks like"Supported" without "in production, by a named client, today". Roadmap answers to coverage questions are the most common way a selection goes wrong.
Hedge fund weighting — multiplier 1.3Raised highest with commercial. Hedge fund instrument coverage is the usual breaking point: shorts, swaps, financing, complex derivatives and multi-prime structures are where a long-only system quietly stops working.
| Question | Answer | Base weight | Hedge fund |
|---|---|---|---|
| Which asset classes does the product support in production today? | multi select Required | 5 | 5 |
| Which of these does it support only on the roadmap rather than in production? Asked immediately after the production question so the difference is on the record. | multi select Optional | 4 | 5 |
| Which security identifiers are supported natively? | multi select Required | 4 | 5 |
| Which settlement conventions are supported? | multi select Required | 3 | 4 |
| Which base and reporting currencies are supported, and is multi-currency consolidation automatic? | long text Required | 4 | 5 |
| Can a single trade be allocated across multiple funds or accounts? | boolean Required | 4 | 5 |
| Can positions be held in a pooled account with a sub-account identified on each transaction? | boolean Required | 3 | 4 |
| Which transactions or instruments must still be entered by hand? Every system has some. A vendor claiming none has misunderstood the question or is not answering it. | long text Required | 4 | 5 |
| Is there a full audit trail of who changed what and when, and can it be exported? | boolean Required | 5 | 5 |
| Can a prior-period position or valuation be restated, and is the restatement itself audited? | boolean Required | 4 | 5 |
| Can users build their own reports without vendor involvement? | boolean Required | 4 | 5 |
| Is there a charge for the vendor to build a custom report? | boolean Required | 3 | 4 |
| What is the largest position or transaction volume running on the product today? | short text Required | 4 | 5 |
| How long does an overnight batch or valuation cycle take at that volume? The number that decides whether your people start the day waiting. | short text Required | 4 | 5 |
| Does the system enforce segregation of duties between front and back office? | boolean Required | 5 | 5 |
| Is maker-checker approval supported on material actions, and is it configurable by action type? | boolean Required | 5 | 5 |
| Can a valuation be sourced and approved independently of the people who trade? A recurring operational due diligence finding, and one that a system either supports or quietly prevents. | boolean Required | 5 | 5 |
| Are cash movements and payment instructions subject to an approval workflow with an audit trail? | boolean Required | 5 | 5 |
| Can a user be given read-only access to everything without any ability to change a record? | boolean Required | 3 | 4 |
| Is the product usable on mobile or tablet for approvals and monitoring? | boolean Optional | 2 | 3 |
How data gets in and out, who owns it, and what you can take with you.
As a due diligence questionData ownership and portability are asked in both DDQ and vendor risk review.
What a weak answer looks likeNo documented API, or an export that is a report rather than your data. Ask what leaving looks like before you arrive.
Hedge fund weighting — multiplier 1.2Raised. Funds integrate more systems per unit of size than almost any other buyer, and change them more often.
| Question | Answer | Base weight | Hedge fund |
|---|---|---|---|
| Is there a documented, publicly available API? | boolean Required | 5 | 5 |
| Which integration methods are supported? | multi select Required | 5 | 5 |
| Are API rate limits published, and what are they? | short text Optional | 3 | 4 |
| Do you have existing production connections to our custodian banks? | boolean Required | 5 | 5 |
| List the custodians, administrators and prime brokers you already connect to in production. | long text Required | 4 | 5 |
| Which market data and pricing vendors are supported out of the box? | multi select Optional | 3 | 4 |
| Must we license market data separately, or is it included? | single select Required | 4 | 5 |
| Can we extract ALL of our data, including history, in a documented open format, at any time and without a fee? The single most important commercial question on this form, and the one most often left vague. | boolean Required | 5 | 5 |
| Who owns the data we put into the system, and who owns data derived from it? | long text Required | 5 | 5 |
| Is our data commingled with other clients' data in the same database? | boolean Required | 4 | 5 |
| Do you ever use client data, in identifiable or aggregated form, for your own product, benchmarking or research? | boolean Required | 5 | 5 |
| How long is our data retained after the contract ends, and when is it destroyed? | short text Required | 4 | 5 |
How the product is deployed, where it runs, and what happens when part of it fails.
As a due diligence questionBusiness continuity and disaster recovery are explicit DDQ and ODD sections. Expect to be asked for the vendor's plan, not just its existence.
What a weak answer looks likeA recovery objective with no evidence of a test. Ask for the date of the last failover and what broke.
Hedge fund weighting — multiplier 1Unchanged. Important to everyone; not distinctively more so here.
| Question | Answer | Base weight | Hedge fund |
|---|---|---|---|
| How is the product deployed? | single select Required | 4 | 4 |
| Which cloud provider and regions host our data? | short text Required | 4 | 4 |
| Do all clients run the same version of the software? A vendor maintaining a different version per client will be slow to fix anything. | boolean Required | 4 | 4 |
| Is the whole product a single platform, or assembled from separately acquired systems? | single select Required | 4 | 4 |
| When was the core of the product first written, and has it been rewritten since? Not a criticism. Age brings coverage and scar tissue; a recent rewrite brings speed and risk. Buyers should see which they are getting. | short text Required | 3 | 3 |
| How often do you release, and can we defer an upgrade? | long text Required | 3 | 3 |
| Is there a client test environment refreshed from production data? | boolean Required | 4 | 4 |
| What was measured uptime, month by month, for the last 24 months? Asked as measured history, not as a target. The MSBI RFP asks for exactly this and it is rarely volunteered. | long text Required | 5 | 5 |
| Is there a client-accessible status page showing incidents and planned maintenance? | boolean Required | 3 | 3 |
| What was the longest single unplanned outage in the last 24 months? | short text Required | 4 | 4 |
Whether the vendor's security is independently attested, and what happens when it fails.
As a due diligence questionThe most heavily DDQ-driven section. Questions here follow the Shared Assessments risk domains, and your investors' operational due diligence will ask you what your vendors answered.
What a weak answer looks likeAn attestation named without a date or scope. A SOC 2 Type II covering a different product is not evidence about the one you are buying.
Hedge fund weighting — multiplier 1.2Raised. Position and trading data is among the most sensitive a firm holds, and a leak is a competitive event as well as a regulatory one.
| Question | Answer | Base weight | Hedge fund |
|---|---|---|---|
| Which independent attestations do you hold currently? | multi select Required | 5 | 5 |
| Will you provide the most recent report under a non-disclosure agreement? | boolean Required | 5 | 5 |
| Were there any qualifications or exceptions in the most recent report? The report's existence is the easy question. Its exceptions are the useful one. | boolean Required | 4 | 5 |
| When was the last independent penetration test, and will you share the summary? | long text Required | 4 | 5 |
| Is data encrypted in transit and at rest? | boolean Required | 5 | 5 |
| Is single sign-on supported, and is multi-factor authentication enforced? | boolean Required | 5 | 5 |
| Is role-based access control granular enough to restrict by fund, book or function? | boolean Required | 4 | 5 |
| Can your own staff see our data, and is that access logged and reviewable by us? Vendor-side access is the exposure clients most often forget to ask about. | boolean Required | 5 | 5 |
| Have you had a security incident affecting client data in the last three years? | boolean Required | 5 | 5 |
| If so, what happened and what changed as a result? | long text Optional | 4 | 5 |
| What are your documented recovery time and recovery point objectives? | short text Required | 5 | 5 |
| When did you last test the disaster recovery plan, and what was the result? | long text Required | 4 | 5 |
| Do you hold cyber liability insurance, and at what limit? | short text Optional | 3 | 4 |
| Do you assess the security of your own critical suppliers? SIG added supply chain risk as a domain in 2024. Your vendor's vendors are your exposure too. | boolean Required | 3 | 4 |
| Are background checks carried out on staff with access to client data? | boolean Required | 3 | 4 |
Which regimes the product supports directly, and how it keeps up when rules change.
As a due diligence questionRegulatory coverage is a standard DDQ line, and the answer is specific to your jurisdictions rather than general.
What a weak answer looks likeA list of regimes without saying which are delivered in the product versus configured by you or a consultant.
Hedge fund weighting — multiplier 1Unchanged, but read it against your OWN registrations. This is the section where a generic weighting helps least.
| Question | Answer | Base weight | Hedge fund |
|---|---|---|---|
| Which regulatory reporting regimes does the product support directly? | multi select Optional | 4 | 4 |
| When a regime changes, is the update included in the licence or charged separately? | single select Required | 4 | 4 |
| Can the system evidence to an auditor who saw or changed a given record, and when? | boolean Required | 5 | 5 |
| Are records retained in a form that satisfies books-and-records obligations, and for how long? | long text Required | 4 | 4 |
| Is there a legal hold capability that suspends deletion? | boolean Optional | 3 | 3 |
| In which jurisdictions is our data stored and processed? | short text Required | 5 | 5 |
| Can data residency be restricted to a named jurisdiction? | boolean Required | 4 | 4 |
| Are you a data controller or a data processor in this relationship? | single select Required | 4 | 4 |
| Will you sign our data processing agreement, or do you require yours? | single select Required | 3 | 3 |
| Do you accept a right of audit by us or our regulator? | boolean Required | 4 | 4 |
Where machine learning or generative models sit in the product, what data trains and prompts them, and what happens when they are wrong.
As a due diligence questionNewly a DDQ area. Investors have begun asking managers what AI their vendors use and what happens to firm data, and a vendor unable to answer creates a gap in your own responses.
What a weak answer looks likeEnthusiasm without a data-handling answer. The questions that matter are whether your data trains a shared model, and whether a human can see and overrule the output.
Hedge fund weighting — multiplier 1.1Slightly raised, entirely because of the data question. Whether your positions leave the tenancy is not a feature question.
| Question | Answer | Base weight | Hedge fund |
|---|---|---|---|
| Does the product use machine learning or generative AI anywhere in its normal operation? Asked first and plainly. Everything else in this section depends on the answer. | boolean Required | 5 | 5 |
| Where is it used? | multi select Optional | 4 | 4 |
| Is client data ever used to train models that serve other clients? | boolean Required | 5 | 5 |
| Can we opt out of AI features entirely and keep full product function? | boolean Required | 5 | 5 |
| Which third-party model providers process our data, if any? | short text Optional | 4 | 4 |
| Does our data leave your infrastructure to reach those providers? | boolean Optional | 5 | 5 |
| Is a human review step required before an AI output affects a book, a trade or a client report? | boolean Required | 5 | 5 |
| Do you publish model documentation covering training data provenance, versioning and known limitations? Model cards and datasheets. Auditors and regulators increasingly ask for model lineage. | boolean Required | 4 | 4 |
| Are AI-generated outputs labelled as such in the interface? | boolean Optional | 4 | 4 |
| How do you measure and monitor accuracy, and will you share the numbers? | long text Optional | 4 | 4 |
| Who owns the output the model produces from our data, and who is liable if it is wrong? | long text Required | 5 | 5 |
| Do you have a documented AI governance policy, and will you share it? | boolean Required | 3 | 3 |
| Have you assessed the product against the EU AI Act, and how is it classified? | long text Optional | 3 | 3 |
What it will actually take to go live, from whom, and over what period.
As a due diligence questionNot a DDQ area, but the section where quoted numbers and outcomes diverge most, so it is where reference calls earn their keep.
What a weak answer looks likeAn elapsed time with no statement of what your people must do. Implementation cost is mostly your staff, and it is rarely in the proposal.
Hedge fund weighting — multiplier 1.1Slightly raised. A fund has fewer people to spare, so an implementation demanding six months of an operations lead is a larger proportional cost.
| Question | Answer | Base weight | Hedge fund |
|---|---|---|---|
| What is a realistic elapsed time to production for a firm of our size? | single select Required | 5 | 5 |
| What was the actual elapsed time for your three most recent comparable clients? Asked right after the estimate, because the two are often different and the gap is the answer. | short text Required | 5 | 5 |
| How many of OUR people will you need, in what roles, and for how long? The cost firms consistently underestimate, and the one the fee schedule never shows. | long text Required | 5 | 5 |
| Is historical data migration included, and how far back? | long text Required | 4 | 4 |
| Who is responsible if migrated data does not reconcile? | long text Required | 4 | 4 |
| Is a parallel run against our existing system supported? | boolean Required | 4 | 4 |
| Is implementation charged as a fixed price or time and materials? | single select Required | 4 | 4 |
| Is implementation delivered by your own staff or a third-party integrator? | single select Required | 4 | 4 |
| Are there acceptance criteria we sign off against before go-live? | boolean Required | 4 | 4 |
| What would you need us to have ready before you could start? | long text Required | 3 | 3 |
Who answers when something breaks, at what hour, and with what authority to fix it.
As a due diligence questionService levels appear in DDQ questionnaires and in the contract. Get the definitions, not the percentages.
What a weak answer looks likeA severity matrix with no worked example. Ask what happened to the last severity-one incident and how long it took.
Hedge fund weighting — multiplier 1.2Raised. A fund trading across sessions needs cover across them, and a system down at the open is a trading loss, not a productivity one.
| Question | Answer | Base weight | Hedge fund |
|---|---|---|---|
| What hours is support staffed, in our time zone? | single select Required | 5 | 5 |
| Which channels are available for raising an issue? | multi select Required | 3 | 4 |
| What is the contractual response time for a critical production issue? | short text Required | 5 | 5 |
| Are service levels contractual, with a remedy if missed? A target in a slide is not a service level. This question separates the two. | boolean Required | 5 | 5 |
| What is the committed uptime percentage in the contract? | number Required | 5 | 5 |
| Is there a documented escalation path with named roles? | boolean Required | 4 | 5 |
| What proportion of tickets were resolved within the target last quarter? | number Optional | 4 | 5 |
| How do clients influence the product roadmap? | long text Required | 3 | 4 |
| Is there a client user group, and how often does it meet? | boolean Optional | 2 | 2 |
| Are training and ongoing user education included? | boolean Required | 3 | 4 |
What it costs across the whole term, what makes the price move, and what leaving costs.
As a due diligence questionNot a DDQ area, but fee transparency to investors makes the all-in number matter beyond your own budget.
What a weak answer looks likeA year-one price with no year-five number and no cap on the annual increase. Ask for both in writing.
Hedge fund weighting — multiplier 1.3Raised highest with function. Pricing driven by assets under management behaves very differently for a fund that may double or halve in a year, and that asymmetry is negotiable at selection and never afterwards.
| Question | Answer | Base weight | Hedge fund |
|---|---|---|---|
| How is the product priced? | single select Required | 5 | 5 |
| What is the total first-year cost for our stated requirement, including implementation? | currency Required | 5 | 5 |
| What is the total annual cost in years two through five? The MSBI RFP asks for a five-year total. Year one alone hides where the money actually goes. | currency Required | 5 | 5 |
| What is NOT included in that figure? Asked explicitly because the gap between the quote and the invoice lives here. | long text Required | 5 | 5 |
| Does the price change if our assets or headcount grow, and on what basis? | long text Required | 4 | 5 |
| Is there a contractual cap on annual price increases? | boolean Required | 5 | 5 |
| If so, what is it? | short text Optional | 4 | 5 |
| What is the minimum contract term? | single select Required | 4 | 5 |
| What notice period is required to terminate, and can we terminate for convenience? | long text Required | 5 | 5 |
| On exit, in what format is our data returned, over what period, and at what cost? Ask before signing. It is unanswerable on favourable terms afterwards. | long text Required | 5 | 5 |
| Will you provide transition assistance to a successor supplier, and on what terms? | long text Required | 4 | 5 |
| Is there a source code escrow or continuity arrangement if the company fails? | boolean Required | 3 | 4 |
| What limitation of liability do you require, and is it a multiple of fees? | short text Required | 4 | 5 |