I went back to this deal because of a survey. It came out eight months after the announcement, and it made me read the whole thing again with a different question in mind, which was who exactly Ripple expected to sell stablecoins to.
On 16 October 2025 Ripple announced a $1 billion acquisition of GTreasury. Its release called the target "the global leader in treasury management systems". Ripple is a crypto payments company. GTreasury sells the software that corporate treasurers use to see their cash across banks, forecast it, pay suppliers and manage currency and interest rate risk.
The release named two goals. One was access to the repo market through Hidden Road, the prime broker Ripple had bought earlier that year, so that companies could earn more on short-term cash. I found the second goal more familiar. It was real-time cross-border payments, which the release tied to Ripple's track record in global payments.
Brad Garlinghouse, Ripple's chief executive, said finance teams could "put their trapped capital to work, process payments instantly, and open up new growth opportunities". GTreasury's chief executive, Renaat Ver Eecke, called it "a watershed moment for treasury management". I wrote down his other line. The shift, he said, was "from managing capital to activating it". By 4 December 2025 Ripple described the deal as "now-closed" on its own site.
This was not a startup. According to the release, GTreasury had over 1,000 customers across 160 countries and four decades in the business, run from Chicago with offices in Dublin, London, Sydney, Singapore and Manila.
I tried to price it and got nowhere. My own arithmetic gives just under $1m per customer, since $1 billion is spread over a little more than 1,000 accounts, but I cannot turn that into a revenue multiple without the revenue itself. I looked for it. Neither side published GTreasury's revenue, and I have not found it in any filing I could open.
The deal sat inside a bigger shopping list. Ripple's December 2025 summary says the company had put nearly $4 billion into the crypto ecosystem through investments and acquisitions, and it counted four major acquisitions in 2025 alone. I looked up two of them. One was the $200m purchase of Rail, a stablecoin payments platform, and the other was the custody firm Palisade.
The GTreasury name went too. Ripple's transition page says "The GTreasury name is retiring" and calls the product Ripple Treasury, and Ver Eecke appears in an October 2026 release as Senior Vice President of Ripple Treasury rather than as anyone's chief executive.
Now the survey that sent me back. The Association for Financial Professionals ran its 2026 Liquidity Survey in March 2026 among 309 treasury professionals at US organisations, with Invesco as underwriter, and published the results on 16 June. I read the release and two summaries.
The mood is cautious. Forty-six percent of organisations increased their US cash balances over the year to March, up from 38% a year earlier, and on average 83% of short-term balances sit in bank deposits, money market funds and Treasury securities.
I keep thinking about the bank share. AFP says the average share of short-term investments held in bank deposits fell to 42%, the lowest since 2011. According to AFP excerpts published by Crane Data, the figure was 46% in the 2025 survey and 55% in 2022.
So corporate cash has been leaving bank deposits for four straight years. I can see why the easy reading of the Ripple deal is that this money is heading for stablecoins, and that Ripple bought the treasury desk to sit right in its path. I checked where it went. AFP says it moved toward Treasury securities.
This is the number that bothered me. AFP found that only 1% of organisations are piloting or using stablecoins or tokenised products, even in a limited way, while another 9% are exploring them. By my arithmetic, 1% of 309 respondents is about three companies.
I expected the forward view to be warmer. Ben Poole's write-up of the report for CTMfile says 55% are aware of these products but not exploring them, and 35% don't know where their organisation stands. Only 7% expect stablecoins or tokenised products to be extremely or very relevant over the next three years. A larger group, 47%, expect them to be irrelevant.
Investment policies say the same thing. Stablecoins, tokenised deposits or tokenised money market funds are approved by 1% of organisations, and among the firms now revising their policies only 5% are considering stablecoin capabilities. Tom Hunt, AFP's director of treasury practice, said current strategies leave these products "on the periphery for most treasury teams despite high awareness".
Then I found Ripple quoting the same survey. It used two AFP numbers in a release dated 26 October 2026, and the first was the 46% who increased cash. The second was a finding that "86% of treasury professionals said their organizations would choose real-time money market funds if they met their investment policies". I looked for the 1% twice. It was not in the release.
That release shows how far the pitch has moved in a year. In October 2025 Ripple led with payments and repo access, and the product it unveiled at Swell 2026 leads with yield on cash that would otherwise sit still.
The feature is called 24/7 Returns. Ripple says it helps eligible customers "generate returns on operating cash that would otherwise remain idle overnight, over weekends, and during holidays". The returns apply to qualifying digital assets held in a Ripple wallet, including the RLUSD stablecoin, subject to program requirements. Customers can take part "without independently managing the underlying digital asset transactions".
My guess is that this answers the AFP data. Treasurers want income on idle cash. They also want money that moves outside banking hours, and from what the survey shows very few of them want to run a crypto desk to get either of those things. I suspect Ripple is selling the first two and keeping the third behind the screen.
The release named American Airlines, Trax, Christian Louboutin, Subway, Adecco and Kingfisher as businesses on the platform. Ripple's treasury homepage lists more than 300 pre-built bank connectors and says 60% of eligible customers have switched on its Risk Insights tool. I have not seen one figure for RLUSD balances.
One more AFP finding matters to me here. Counterparty risk is now cited by 54% of organisations when they choose a bank for deposits, an 11-point jump in a year, while relationship strength still comes first at 81% and credit quality sits at 60%.
Policy approval for bank deposits has slipped as well. Eighty percent of organisations approve them now, up from 78% in 2025 but well below the 91% of 2024. I read that as a slow drift. It still puts the bank that holds a company's deposits under more scrutiny than it faced two years ago, and that scrutiny is what a software layer can use.
This is where the purchase starts to make sense to me. A treasury management system sits between a company and every bank it uses, so whoever owns that layer sees where the cash is and can offer another home for it at the moment a treasurer decides.
Retention comes first for me. Ripple says every tool and workflow carries forward under the new name. I would still want to see how many of the 1,000-plus customers renewed after the rebrand, and on what terms.
Then the revenue split. I would ask how much comes from software fees and how much from returns and payments. The first is the business Ripple bought for $1 billion, and the second is the business it hopes to grow on a market where 1% of US treasury teams are piloting or using these products today.
Then the 2027 survey. Hunt said treasury teams "need to build their knowledge now", since more stablecoin rules are still in development after the GENIUS Act. If the 9% who are exploring turn into pilots, Ripple bought early. If that group stays flat, Ripple owns a good treasury management system with a sales channel still waiting for its buyers. I still cannot tell which of those two Ripple is betting on.