City uses the Web to find investment bids
Goldsboro, N.C., has been using an online service to get bids on financial services and investments. The service has saved staff time and has allowed the city to reach a greater number of banks.
When Goldsboro looks for short-term investments, the task falls to Account Technician Kaye Scott, who has worked with the city for more than 20 years. Traditionally, she has contacted local banks to gather quotes, chosen the best bid and called all of the banks again to inform them of a “winner.”
“It takes too much time to call four bankers, get quotes and then call them back,” Scott says. “The old process would take me at least an hour and a half.”
In addition to the time spent gathering bids, Goldsboro faced the problem of a steadily shrinking pool of bidders. “We have had a problem increasing the number of banks in our competitive pool,” says Finance Director Richard Durham. “Due to mergers in the banking industry, we [have been] losing banks quickly.”
In September 2000, the city began using an online service from Charlotte, N.C.-based ClickRFP.com to save time gathering bids on city investments and to increase its bid pool. Durham chose to use the online service in part because it was designed and managed by Ralph Staley, a former president of the North Carolina Government Finance Officers Association and the North Carolina Local Government Investment Association. “I was comfortable knowing that Ralph has been in our shoes and is on our side,” Durham says.
Using the company’s Web site, Scott enters the amount of money the city wants to invest, along with the bid deadline. Those criteria are submitted as a request for proposal to the banks that Scott has chosen to include.
At the deadline, Scott checks her e-mail and reviews a company-prepared spreadsheet that organizes the quotes in an easy-to-read format. She chooses the best deal and is done. The process takes fewer than five minutes. “I enter a couple of lines of information and just wait until my deadline,” she says.
Only the winning bidder pays a fee for the online service. There are no subscription fees for governments or financial institutions to submit or respond to an RFP.
“With the old system, we scheduled investments once a week,” Durham says. “But with the ease of using this system and doing things online, I don’t see why we couldn’t be investing our money more quickly and getting — hopefully — a better return on funds.”
