A Best Practice for One Treasurer’s TMS RFP: Ask NeuGroup Peers

# Cash and Working Capital

# Foreign Exchange

# Technology

Exchanging info with other NeuGroup members helps one treasurer narrow down choices and pick Ripple’s GTreasury.

A treasurer at a growing pharmaceutical company produced a five-year roadmap at the end of 2024 outlining for senior leadership what she needed to ensure the enterprise achieved its long-term goals. Among the necessities: a treasury management system (TMS) to help her move beyond Excel spreadsheets and eventually take on tasks like FX hedging. The TMS, she said, would help her manage a full workload with just one other treasury team member.

The treasurer described to NeuGroup Insights the RFP process and the importance of connecting with other members of NeuGroup for Life Sciences Treasurers who provided valuable insights and feedback. This year, she and the company’s IT department—which owns the project—entered into contract negotiations with GTreasury, which was acquired by Ripple in 2025.

“I was able to leverage NeuGroup to connect with peers, which was extremely helpful in gaining perspectives on aspects that vendors don’t always highlight,” she said.

Her approach impressed John Kane, who runs NeuGroup for Technology Transformation and is a former treasury technology solution consultant. In his previous roles, “I would love to have an opportunity where the prospect conducted such a structured and disciplined process. It would show me that they were serious and that I should spend time trying to win the business.

“And as a treasurer, you want that kind of attitude from your potential providers.”

An RFP with hundreds of questions. The first stage of the NeuGroup member’s process involved finding a TMS request for proposal (RFP) template provided by AFP with nearly 700 questions. “From this baseline, we selected the questions that were relevant to our requirements, adapted some where appropriate and added a limited number of additional questions. This process resulted in a total of 380 questions,” the treasurer said.

The final RFP was built in an Excel workbook with 13 tabs, one for each functional and technical segment. Every tab included yes/no response fields and a classification code column with these definitions:

S-standard functionality

M-modification required

T-third party

F-future release

U-under development

NA-not available

In another column, vendors could add detailed comments to support their answers, and a majority of responses included them.

Four-hour demos and Copilot. The treasurer sent the RFP to five vendors selected following conversations with consultants, bankers and other practitioners. Four vendors submitted proposals; one said it could not meet the requirements. Using Microsoft Copilot to organize more than 1,500 responses into a single spreadsheet—a project manager’s idea—allowed her to compare the answers quickly.

The next steps included writing a script for the vendors to use during demos where she wanted to see how each system handled specific workflows and functions. She also sent them screenshots of her Excel spreadsheets to make clear what she needed a system to do. Each demo lasted four hours.

The treasurer had used one of the TMS platforms at another company but was unfamiliar with the other three. After the demos, she eliminated one of the four vendors, telling a peer in the NeuGroup Community, “After our review, [that vendor] wasn’t the best fit for us—the platform seemed to require multiple steps for core functions, and we couldn’t easily get a consolidated view of our cash position—including investments—in one place.”

A peer who uses the system the treasurer eliminated had told her, “It is fine, but it does seem that anytime we want additional functionality, we have to pay more and pay a consultant to implement it, e.g. post-trade module for FX, liquidity module.”

Follow-up conversations and working capital. Following the demos, the treasurer held 30-minute phone calls with the vendors. “There was a lot of back and forth after the demo sessions because we still had questions,” she said. One of those questions concerned her responsibility of monitoring working capital—a current focus of many NeuGroup members.

“I know it’s not super common, but I wanted to see if the system could calculate DSO and DPO by customer and by vendor based on the information that we have from the bank and from our accounts receivable and accounts payable,” she said.

It turned out that GTreasury’s AI forecasting tool GSmart Ledger does exactly what the treasurer wanted. “That tool can combine the information you receive from the bank plus the accounts receivable and accounts payable and calculate the DSO by customer or DPO by vendor and use that same information to forecast,” the treasurer said.

“So if that customer pays me in 30 days, but typically in 35, when I send [the TMS] my AR, it’s going to calculate based on 35 and it shows all the calculations, all the percentages all the KPIs. I said, ‘This is helpful—this is what’s going to help me.’”

Help narrowing down the list. Last December, the member posted a question in the online community NeuGroup offers members of every peer group. She wrote, “As we approach the final stage of our RFP process to select a TMS, I’d appreciate your insights regarding the solutions you currently use. Could you kindly share:

“Which TMS you use.

“Your level of satisfaction with the system.

“Whether you’d be open to a brief follow-up discussion for additional feedback.”

The member later said she had not expected the second and third choice vendors to be so close to one another, one reason she wanted input from peers. Another concern: her perception that many life sciences companies use TMSs other than GTreasury. She made clear that help from peers helped her avoid too much second-guessing of her decisions. Insights from NeuGroup peers. One peer had used one of the three remaining vendors on the treasurer’s list for a decade. “Our biggest challenge is with customer service—no direct phone numbers; everything is done via a case,” he told her.

The treasurer eventually narrowed her search to GTreasury and one other vendor. “Both solutions offer comprehensive functionality and strong scalability, which are critical factors for us,” she told peers.

The interface of the eventual runner-up “lacks polish,” the treasurer said, adding that “most modules seem to deliver suboptimal results compared to other solutions.”

Meanwhile, “GTreasury appears robust and user-friendly, with an intuitive two-click interface. Its reporting, forecasting and FX capabilities align well with our current treasury maturity.”

One of the peers put the treasurer in touch with a practitioner who uses GTreasury. That person’s in-depth experience—combined with the RFP and demo—ultimately helped cement the treasurer’s decision to go with GTreasury.

Implementation and monitoring. The treasurer said most TMS vendors say the implementation process will take about six months. Her hope is that once contract negotiations are complete, she can begin to use GTreasury dashboards by the end of the second quarter. She wants “all the rest” of the system’s functions, including FX exposure functionality, by the end of the year.

Looking beyond implementation, the treasurer said she hopes that “Ripple’s acquisition of GTreasury ultimately translates into increased investment in the platform over time. At this stage, it is difficult to determine whether this will, in practice, result in greater product investment or accelerated development, and this remains something to monitor going forward.”

In a statement, Ripple Treasury said, “We understand why customers are watching closely as any acquisition raises fair questions about where investment will flow. What we can say clearly: the Ripple acquisition has done the opposite of slowing us down. We operate debt-free, allowing us to reinvest 100% of earnings back into innovation and development. That means we’ve been able to double our engineering and product investment in the near term, with plans to continue accelerating.”

A Best Practice for One Treasurer’s TMS RFP: Ask NeuGroup Peers

Exchanging info with other NeuGroup members helps one treasurer narrow down choices and pick Ripple’s GTreasury.

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