Deal Room for Mergers and Acquisitions

9 April, 2021

How to Speed the Development of your M&A Deal.

To the uninitiated, a merger & acquisition deal sounds exciting. But those who actually live through the experience know it is tough going: a small army of lawyers, accountants, researchers, analysts and dealmakers wading through reams of documents, all sworn to secrecy, all moving as fast as they can, all knowing that a mistake or misjudgment or delay can derail the entire project.

The times are ripe for M&A. PwC notes that on the buying side, corporate and private investors have access to capital and can pursue deals to build scale and expand scope. On the sellers’ side, businesses that have fallen into distress during the pandemic as well as companies pursuing strategies that entail parting with non-core assets are ready to make a deal.

The pandemic slowed M&A activity in the first half of 2020, in part because of unfamiliarity with remote collaboration. M&A firms, investment banks and PE firms have learned from the experience and come to appreciate the value of a secure online environment for dealmaking – an important consideration as deal-making accelerates in 2021 and beyond.

How Technology Can Speed the M&A Deal Process

ShareVault is ideally suited for M&A deal development. ShareVault’s online platform provides a Virtual Data Room (VDR) that is ultra-secure and can readily accommodate participation from dozens of collaborators, on-site and remote.

Equally important for the M&A deal manager, ShareVault integrates multiple software technologies that can dramatically improve the speed of development.

Faster Collaboration

With a ShareVault VDR, attorneys, auditors, analysts, and consultants can review materials safely and securely. This includes collaboration with remote parties, who can join in from any device, anywhere, anytime, to view and add or remove documents, analytics and data.

ShareVault’s software speeds the process of organization, access and viewing and ensures a secure collaboration.

Faster Document Organization and Access

The ShareVault VDR includes a repository for all of the documents of the due diligence process. An M&A deal manager can start with a ShareVault Due Diligence Checklist, which provides a built-in system for file organization. The team can then make use of ShareVault’s built-in software to make document organization and access fast and easy. Among the software’s features:

  • Intuitively designed software, enabling users to gain proficiency quickly
  • Hierarchical Tags: These work like folders but have the additional benefit of tags, which allows a user to trace a document when it is located in multiple folders
  • Drag-and-Drop Editing: Reorder files and tags with a simple mouse movement
  • Index Auto-Numbering: Numbering automatically adjusts as you add or delete documents
  • Instant Full-text Search: Keyword search results display in context
  • Smart Filters: Use Recent, File Type, Read/Unread, Published By filters to improve search speed
  • Zoomable Thumbnails: Zoom into the first page of a document to gauge the relevance
  • Seamless Integration: ShareVault works with multiple file-sharing applications, including DropBox, SharePoint, OneDrive and DocuSign
  • Auditing: Page-level Tracking provides an audit of user interaction, by date/time, activity, group, user or tag. Results can be shown as a scrollable list of events or a graphical timeline.

A Faster and Better Presentation

ShareVault’s intuitive software also speeds collaboration in fundraising with your target audience, making it easy for limited partners, investors and other parties to view your presentation. The platform’s built-in security measures will continue to protect your Deal Room even when your customers are joining your presentation from a platform of unknown security quality.

An Ultra-secure Due Diligence Process

A ShareVault VDR provides maximum protection:

  • Files at rest are encrypted with AES-256
  • File connections are via HTTPS over Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), providing AES-256 encryption in transit
  • ShareVault’s security is backed by multiple certifications, including SOC 1/2/3, PCI, ISO 90001 / 27001 / 27017 / 27018, FedRAMP Moderate, DoD CC SRG IL2, HIPAA, and HITRUST

Only a user with the proper password authentication has access to the ShareVault VDR. A due diligence team leader can enhance the security of a user's login process by selecting two-step verification, which requires the user to enter a secure code which is delivered either by phone text message or via the Google Authenticator app.

To ensure that security protocols are maintained, ShareVault provides detailed reports of which documents have been viewed, by whom, at what time, right down to the specific pages viewed and the time spent on them.

The security status of collaborators may change. ShareVault accommodates that situation with controls that allow a team leader to set an access expiration date for any user. He or she can also remotely “shred” documents, including documents that have already been downloaded.

ShareVault partners with DocuSign to enable users to sign and transmit a document without leaving the VDR’s ultra-secure environment. Additional DocuSign features include email alerts, signature placements, form fields, template design, and the eSignature workflow flexibility.

24-hour Support

ShareVault knows that with a deal on the line, time is everything. That’s why ShareVault provides round-the-clock support from our IT team, who can answer questions and resolve issues quickly and efficiently.

ShareVault: Focus on your Deal, not the Software!

The value of a great M&A team is their ability to examine, analyze, evaluate and recommend. ShareVault’s VDR deal rooms allow a team to focus on that value, without cumbersome and time-consuming document processing or concerns about security.

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M&A Software

M&A Due Diligence Checklist

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