By Joseph Neu
As 2014 marks the 20th Anniversary of The NeuGroup, we take this opportunity to highlight some of the company’s key milestones. Of course, The NeuGroup started in 1994 as the publisher of this, our flagship International Treasurer publication, and we will mark its 20th Anniversary separately starting in March, when its first issue appeared. The milestones to follow outline the development of our time-tested approach to membership peer groups, the first of their kind in the corporate treasury space, for which The NeuGroup is now best known.
The road to neugroups
In 1996, we held our first seminar, The Global Treasury and Financial Risk Management Short Course. The 30-maximum attendee format was a precursor to the member peer groups to come and the agenda topics still resonate, including evolving organizational issues for global treasury functions, international tax considerations, exposure identification and management, along with enterprise risk management.
Among those in attendance was Tyler Johnson, then a senior FX analyst at Dell, who continues to be an active NeuGroup member, now as Dell’s treasurer.
The euro was also on the agenda as it was about to be born as a major new international currency with the European Economic and Monetary Union. To help MNC treasurers prepare, we began a series of roundtables over the course of 1997 and 1998. These culminated in a special report, Treasury Preparation for EMU: Building a Platform to Launch Euro Business Strategies, produced in association with The Chase Manhattan Bank and PeopleSoft.
Leading peer knowledge exchange on topical issues was again the center of our efforts to help finance professionals prepare for FAS 133, a transforming new hedge accounting standard.
Over the course of 1998 through 2000, we engaged with leading practitioners to help them assess the impact of FAS 133 on risk management strategies and techniques, keep them up to date on implementation guidance coming out of the FASB and its Derivatives Implementation Group (DIG) and even influence change to the standard.
We did this via roundtables and small seminars, publishing Best Practice Guides, conducting conference calls and ultimately harnessing the web to launch FAS133.com, a first-of-its-kind web briefing service to help corporates understand and implement the new hedge accounting guidance.
By 2000, we were conducting regular roundtables on topics ranging from treasury’s use of technology to shared service centers. Focused, interactive meetings with leading peer professionals, facilitated by a trusted organization familiar with their current issues, were consistently well received. It become clear to us that our approach to bringing professionals together was as key to these meetings’ success as the topics.
With this insight and an opportunistic conversation with Adobe Treasurer Barbara Hill in her company cafeteria in Silicon Valley, we developed a new approach. Thanks to the support of a select group of top tech treasurers and UBS, we were able to launch the Tech20 Treasurers’ Peer Group in 2001. The Tech20’s success validated our membership peer group approach and served as a model for many NeuGroups to follow.
In 2002, we turned an FX management benchmarking request from McDonald’s into the FX Managers’ Peer Group. This was the first of our “functional” treasury peer groups.
By 2005, we had added a cross-industry treasurer group, The Treasurers’ Group of Thirty (with help from the GM treasurers’ office and its alumni, plus the support of Citi), a Bank Treasurers’ Peer Group, a regionally-focused treasury group for Latin America and one for Europe; plus additional functional groups for global cash managers, cash-rich cash investors and a second one for FX managers.
Today, The NeuGroup Network offers over 330 members the most relevant groups (16+), the greatest variety (cutting across sectors, finance functions and global regions), and the longest-running groups available. Over two decades, we’ve never stopped enhancing their experience, from publications to web-based intelligence services to peer groups—and we don’t intend to stop now.