Bid Manager

Overview

You manage the bid and proposal process for Equals Money, a fintech selling multi-currency accounts, corporate cards, and international payment solutions to businesses. You're the project manager who pulls together Sales, Product, Risk, and Compliance teams to respond to RFPs and RFIs—often from prospects in regulated verticals like iGaming, digital assets, travel, and e-commerce. You're writing, editing, coordinating stakeholders, and making sure responses go out on time and hit all the compliance requirements.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Private, mature (387 employees suggests Series B/C equivalent)

Size: 387 employees

Growth: Actively building out GTM infrastructure, hiring across Rev Ops functions

Market Position: Challenger in crowded B2B fintech payments space—competing against banks, legacy FX providers, and newer fintechs

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Active Bids (50%) | Content Library (20%) | Stakeholder Coordination (20%) | Process Improvement (10%)

Key Activities

• RFP Intake and Triage: Sales flags an RFP. You review it, assess effort vs opportunity size, create a project plan with deadlines, and assign sections to SMEs across Product, Risk, Compliance, and Legal.
• Content Wrangling: You're chasing down technical answers from Product, security questionnaires from IT, compliance attestations from Risk. You edit everything into consistent language and format. You maintain a content library so you're not starting from scratch each time.
• Compliance and Regulatory Sections: Financial services RFPs have heavy compliance requirements—AML policies, KYC processes, data sovereignty, regulatory licenses. You work with Risk and Compliance to ensure answers are accurate and up to date.
• Proposal Assembly: You pull it all together into a polished document—formatting, design, executive summary, case studies, pricing. You're the quality control gate before it goes to the prospect.
• Post-Submission Support: Sales might need clarifications or follow-up answers. You coordinate those responses and track which proposals are moving forward vs stalled.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Herding Cats Across Teams: Getting timely responses from Product and Risk when they're buried in their own work. You're constantly following up on Slack, email, and in meetings. Deadlines slip and you're the one pushing.
• Repetitive Questions, Custom Answers: Even with a content library, every RFP has unique questions or asks for specific formats. You can't just copy-paste—you're editing and customizing constantly.
• High Stakes, Low Visibility: A bad proposal kills a deal, but a great one just gets you to the next stage. You're often working nights or weekends to hit tight deadlines, and Sales gets the credit when you win.
• Regulated Industry Complexity: Prospects in iGaming, crypto, and payments ask detailed compliance questions. One wrong answer or outdated policy reference can disqualify you or create legal risk.
• Volume Spikes: If Sales is doing well, you get slammed with multiple RFPs at once. If they're slow, you're scrambling to justify your workload with process documentation and library improvements.

What Success Looks Like

• On-Time Submission Rate: You hit 95%+ of deadlines without sacrificing quality.
• Win Rate Improvement: Sales attributes higher win rates to stronger, more compliant proposals. You track bid-to-win metrics.
• Content Library Efficiency: You reduce response time by maintaining a library that covers 70-80% of common questions, so teams aren't rewriting from scratch.
• Stakeholder Feedback: Product, Risk, and Sales tell you the process is smoother and less chaotic than it used to be.

Who You're Supporting

Internal Stakeholders:

• Sales/AEs: They need you to turn around high-quality proposals that differentiate Equals Money and address compliance concerns. They're focused on the deal, not the documentation.
• Product Team: You pull them in for technical and feature questions. They're busy with roadmap work and see RFPs as a distraction.
• Risk & Compliance: They own regulatory and security content. They're conservative and need to approve anything compliance-related before it goes out.
• Leadership: They care about win rates and whether the bid process is scalable as the company grows.

End Buyers (Indirectly):

• Finance leaders, procurement, and risk teams at mid-market and enterprise companies in travel, e-commerce, iGaming, digital assets, and accounting firms. They're evaluating you on compliance, feature fit, pricing, and security.

Requirements

• 3+ years in bid management, proposal management, or sales operations—ideally in financial services, fintech, or another regulated industry
• Experience coordinating cross-functional teams under tight deadlines
• Strong writing and editing skills—you're the final quality gate
• Familiarity with RFP software (e.g., Loopio, RFPIO, Qvidian) or willingness to implement one
• Understanding of financial services compliance and regulatory requirements (AML, KYC, PCI-DSS, GDPR)
• Ability to manage 5-15 active bids simultaneously without dropping the ball
• Comfort working in ambiguity—this is a new function being built out