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How this guide was prepared. Last updated October 2026. It draws on Brandmovers' experience designing loyalty programs for regulated industries and responding to their RFPs. |
A generic loyalty program RFP asks about features, pricing, and timelines. In a regulated industry, those are the easy part. Several requirements decide whether a vendor is viable, and a feature-led template can easily underweight them: security posture, data handling, auditability, and regulatory track record, among others.
This guide covers the regulated-specific sections to add to your RFP, and the evidence to demand for each, so you evaluate vendors on what will matter when an auditor, not a prospect, is asking the questions.
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In an unregulated category, a weak vendor choice costs you a clumsy program. In a regulated one, it can cost you a finding, a fine, or a breach involving sensitive customer data. The stakes change what the RFP has to establish. It is no longer enough to confirm that a vendor can build the program you want; you have to confirm that the vendor can protect the data, produce records on demand, and stand up to the scrutiny your industry attracts. A generic RFP is built to compare features and cost. A regulated one has to also eliminate vendors that cannot meet the bar, and it can only do that if it asks.
For many buyers, vendor oversight is itself a regulatory expectation. The FTC's Safeguards Rule guidance tells financial institutions under its jurisdiction to select service providers with the skills to maintain appropriate safeguards, spell out security expectations in contracts, monitor the provider's work, and periodically reassess its suitability. For banks, the OCC, the Federal Reserve, and the FDIC issued interagency guidance on third-party relationships in June 2023 that outlines a third-party risk management life cycle and the principles for each stage. For covered financial institutions, a loyalty vendor with access to customer information sits inside those expectations; other regulated sectors have their own state and agency rules, so check yours before issuing the RFP. Either way, the RFP is where the evidence trail starts.
Add these sections to your RFP. For each, require documented evidence rather than a yes or a logo, and route the answers to the people who can judge them, which usually means security and compliance, not only marketing.
Ask which security certifications the vendor holds and require current attestation documents, not badges on a website. The ones that matter depend on your data: a SOC 2 Type II report covers a service organization's controls relevant to security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, or privacy over a period of time; PCI DSS applies to entities that store, process, or transmit cardholder data; and ISO/IEC 27001 sets the requirements for an information security management system. Ask every vendor which of these they hold, to provide the current reports or certificates, and to describe their encryption, penetration-testing cadence, and how they handle vulnerabilities. SOC 2 reports are typically restricted-use documents shared under a nondisclosure agreement, so build that step into the RFP timeline. Check each report's scope and period, any exceptions the auditor noted, and whether the loyalty platform and its hosting providers are in scope. A vendor that treats this as a formality is telling you something.
Require the vendor to state how it complies with the privacy laws that apply to you, which may include GLBA in financial services, HIPAA in healthcare, and the GDPR or state laws such as CCPA depending on your customers. Ask where data is stored and processed, who the subprocessors are, and require a data processing agreement as part of the response rather than a contract afterthought. Ask for a data-flow description so you can see where sensitive information actually travels. Check that the vendor can act on privacy requests on your behalf: under the CCPA, for example, consumers can ask a business to delete their personal information and to tell its service providers to do the same. In healthcare settings, a vendor that handles protected health information needs a business associate agreement.
You have to be able to show a regulator what happened and when. Require immutable audit logs, regulator-ready reporting, and clearly stated retention periods, and ask the vendor to provide a sample of the audit trail and reports it can produce. If the vendor cannot show you how it would help you answer an auditor's question, assume it cannot.
Experience in general is not the same as experience in your vertical under its specific rules. Ask for relevant experience in your regulated sector and for references who have been through an audit or examination while using the vendor. A reference who can describe how the vendor performed when a regulator was involved is worth more than a dozen feature testimonials. Vendors choose their references, so ask peers in your sector as well.
In regulated categories, how a program treats customers is itself subject to scrutiny. Ask how the platform supports clear terms, approval workflows for offers and communications, and review of program mechanics for fairness and disclosure. If the vendor uses AI or automated decisioning on customer data, add questions about how those decisions are governed, tested for fairness, and explained. In alcohol, tobacco, and lottery programs, add requirements for age verification or age-gating at enrollment and redemption, and for handling eligibility rules that differ from state to state; ask the vendor to show how those rules are configured and tested. The goal is a vendor whose tooling makes compliant operation easier, not one that leaves governance entirely to you.
Require the vendor's incident-response plan, the timeline for notifying you of a security incident that affects your data, what that notice will contain, and evidence that the plan is tested. Your own notification duties to customers and regulators often depend on how quickly the vendor tells you, so a vague commitment here becomes your problem later.
Require service-level commitments, disaster-recovery and business-continuity plans with evidence they are tested, and, critically, clear exit terms and data portability. You must be able to export your program and customer data in a usable format and leave without being held hostage by the platform. A vendor that makes leaving hard is a risk regardless of how good the demo looks.
Do not bury these requirements as pass-or-fail checkboxes at the end of a feature-weighted scorecard. Weight them by your vertical's actual risk, so that in a category handling payment or health data, security and auditability carry real scoring weight rather than a token line. Treat any missing certification or vague answer as a flag to investigate, not a box to tick, and confirm the answers that matter through evidence and reference checks rather than the vendor's own summary. A scorecard that lets a strong demo outweigh a weak compliance posture is scoring the wrong thing.
Match the rigor to the risk, though. A program that never touches payment or health data does not need every certification, and requiring controls you do not actually need can screen out capable vendors and inflate cost for no gain. The aim is proportionate assurance sized to the data you handle, not the longest possible checklist.
Selection is not the end of due diligence. The FTC's Safeguards Rule guidance calls for contracts that build in ways to monitor a service provider's work and for periodic reassessment of its suitability, and the same discipline suits any regulated buyer. Write it into the contract: annual delivery of refreshed SOC 2 and PCI reports, notice before subprocessors change, audit rights, and a named contact for regulator requests. Then track it: whether reports arrive on time, how quickly the vendor answers audit and data requests, how incidents are handled, and whether exit and export terms still work as the program grows.
A concrete starting set you can adapt to your vertical:
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Requirement area |
What to require |
Evidence to demand |
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Security certifications |
SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS, ISO/IEC 27001 as relevant to your data |
Current reports or certificates, not logos |
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Data privacy |
Compliance with GLBA, HIPAA, GDPR, or CCPA as applicable; a DPA |
Signed DPA, data-flow description, subprocessor list |
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Data residency |
Documented storage and processing locations |
Written locations and controls |
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Auditability |
Immutable logs, regulator-ready reporting, retention periods |
Sample audit trail and report |
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Track record |
Experience in your specific regulated vertical |
References who have been through an audit |
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Incident response |
Tested incident-response plan, defined notification timeline and content |
Plan summary, test evidence, contract notification clause |
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Continuity and exit |
SLAs, tested DR and BCP, data portability |
SLA document, DR test evidence, export format |
This is general information, not legal advice.
The RFP is where a regulated loyalty program is won or lost, because a vendor you cannot audit or exit is a risk no feature list makes up for. Add the regulated-specific sections, require evidence rather than claims, weight the requirements by your real risk, and bring security and compliance in from the first draft. The extra rigor is far cheaper than discovering the gap during an examination.
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Building a loyalty RFP for a regulated industry? Brandmovers designs compliance-minded loyalty programs for regulated sectors on BLOYL™ and can provide current SOC 2 Type II and PCI DSS attestations from its auditor, Hancock Askew & Co., LLP. When Brandmovers modernized the Idaho Lottery's loyalty program on BLOYL, adding second-chance promotions and gamification, site traffic increased over 6X compared to previous years (disclosed by Brandmovers). Request a demo, and hold Brandmovers to the same evidence standard as every vendor on your list. |