PP&A led the research design and analysis for a voice-of-customer survey fielded in April 2024. The questionnaire was built around the client's diligence questions: which FM&A functional areas matter most to buyers, how the provider's features perform against peers in each area, which capabilities respondents believe are lacking, and what an ideal solution would look like.

Respondents were screened to director level and above in finance, accounting, IT and operations at mid-size and large companies, and had to have used or formally evaluated the provider within the previous two years. The survey combined an online instrument with telephone interviewing and closed with 67 completed responses at a median of about 17 minutes each, spanning banking and financial services, manufacturing, healthcare and life sciences, e-commerce and retail, energy and other verticals, and more than twenty states weighted toward the client's priority markets.

The analysis ranked the functional areas by importance, scored each of the provider's features against peers, and produced deep-dive cuts by industry and company size, so that the diligence team could see whether weaknesses were general or concentrated in particular segments.

The survey gave the diligence team an independent, quantified view of the target. Order-to-cash and treasury and risk emerged as the functional areas buyers cared about most. Overall, respondents who had used or evaluated the provider rated it as broadly equivalent to its peers, with genuine strengths in usability, analytics and AI-enabled features.

The weaknesses were just as clear, and consistent across all three functional areas. Customization capabilities topped the list of improvement areas, named by about half of respondents, followed by breadth of pre-built integrations, scalability, pricing and reporting. Respondents repeatedly described a product that worked well until the organization became larger or more complex, for example through global operations, which pointed to a segment of larger customers the provider had yet to serve well. Feature-level scoring identified specific areas of underperformance against peers within each function, and the industry cuts showed where the pattern was strongest.

The report closed with four themes an ideal FM&A solution would need to address: customization and scalability, integration and compatibility with ERP and CRM systems, built-in automation to remove manual touch points, and security and compliance. The diligence team took away a customer-grounded input for its assessment of the target.

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