Digitalization of M&A: See what is possible today in just one afternoon

Corporate M&A teams don´t have the time and bandwidth to research and follow up with a number of vendors and service providers to get an overview of the latest and greatest innovations for M&A processes.

To solve this issue within one afternoon, Xperience Connect organized an event at Frankfurt School of Finance last week providing several pitches of innovative products and services for next generation M&A processes.

So twenty-two corporates met to have a look at ten vendors, 15 minute pitches by the vendors helped getting an overview within an afternoon, followed by a joint dinner to discuss.

Here are my four highlights of the afternoon:

Target screening

an interesting presentation from a researcher how to reduce the number of potential targets based on acquisition goals, they also use an augmented set of company data. This is a startup in stealth mode but they presented anyway…

Automatic contract analysis

RR Donnelley, a vendor of data room called Venue, showed their product eBrevia, which is a tool to automatically analyze contracts in many different languages based on machine learning.
eBrevia contains about 150 provisions it is able to find and analyze, customers can build AND share new provisions with other customers if they like to.
eBrevia can be used with Venue, but also with other data rooms.

Digital valuation

PWC has an open platform for valuation of startups, https://www.pwc-evaluation.com/

Smart M&A

Midaxo did a very interesting presentation of their innovative, cloud-based, end-to-end M&A process platform.
With this platform, all parties collaborate seamlessly following repeatable, systematic processes based on their specific, corporate playbooks.
Several large corporates, including Daimler and Philipsh have adopted this solution.

Thank you, Stefan Gerhard Schneider for organizing this event. He offered to have follow-up meetings with deep dives, which was well received by the corporates.

If you like this content, please also have a look at www.digitalmergers.com