What is smartmerger.com?

1. What does smartmerger.com^® do?

We provide a full online application suite to make your M&A more efficient. Our applications can be used as standalone apps for a specific purpose or a single project phase, or combined as a suite supporting end-to-end data management throughout the entire M&A cycle. Our unique ability to manage structured data allows you to capture, process and manage all M&A data on a single platform. Through our open API, we can even integrate with third-party applications and data sources, giving you a real single source of truth.

The smartmerger.com^® platform is natively designed and built for M&A only. We are not a standard platform with some M&A features, and we are way more than a VDR or playbook. We provide a comprehensive platform, a centralized workplace for all your people and data. We deliver highly secure collaboration functionality that lets people work together in real-time. This includes process and project management, data and document management, reporting and dashboarding.

We do not believe in one-size-fits-all. Every transaction and every client is different; and so is our platform. We frequently impress our clients through our flexibility to adapt to their M&A processes – without writing a single line of code, just by making full use of our platform’s range of configuration and customization options. This is why our customers include small M&A boutiques and large, multinational enterprises, and everything in between.

Our application suite covers all major activities along the M&A process, including pipeline management, target screening, due diligence, smart VDR, day-one-readiness, integration, synergy management, risk management and carve-out management, just to name the most important ones. You can even run your PMI surveys on our platform.

All applications are provided entirely online in a highly secure environment, running in data centers in Germany and Switzerland that meet the highest standards of security and data protection. You can manage all people and data in one single place and even connect them with external data along the whole M&A process.

Using the smartmerger.com^® platform enables you to plan, organize and implement the M&A deal in a secure environment. The smartmerger.com^® software was designed and built for M&A and offers industry-specific features, including audit trail, permissions management, reporting, data collection and more. Our solution consists of many interconnected apps which can be customized as necessary to meet all your needs, from small deals right up to large transactions. Our workspace functionalities also cover your project and collaboration management needs.

The system is entirely self-administrable. After signing up for a subscription (monthly or annual), you get access to your purchased applications. In most cases these apps come pre-configured and pre-loaded with content. All you have to do is invite your team and get everybody going. Our strict permissions management makes sure that people can only access the data they are assigned to work with. Beyond this, you can fine-tune the level of access, such as assigning read, write or download permissions.

To make our platform as user-friendly as possible, we have created dedicated web applications focused on specific tasks. Our app suite bundles them into a comprehensive ecosystem of ready-to-use applications, in many cases pre-loaded with templates and checklists.

You have full flexibility to change the standard configuration or replace existing content with your own. As you progress with your M&A, you can add more applications or connect additional data along the M&A cycle. We not only provide your with many project management functionalities, such as task or risk management, workspaces and document rooms, but also – contrary to other cloud solutions – a  financial-grade security environment that is natively designed and built for handling sensitive and confidential M&A information.

What makes our solution unique is its ability to manage structured data. Gather data, store results, collaborate in real-time on the most recent data, process and analyze data, and compile reports. Our Industry 4.0 (4IR) technology provides you with a data lake of all relevant M&A data in one single, trusted source.

We deliver our M&A platform to clients of any size: from small M&A boutiques to multinational enterprises. Managing M&A deals faster and more efficiently is the goal of every company involved in such a transaction.

We deploy packaged solutions custom-tailored to the needs of specific clients: M&A consultants, M&A law firms, small and medium-sized M&A teams, corporate M&A heads and experts, advisories, private equity firms or family offices.

We provide one single workplace and one single source of truth for all users and data. Having real-time access to the most recent data is key to making the best-informed decisions and keeping abreast of progress and the level of completeness. Most of our subscription packages allow an unlimited number of users so you are free to give access to everyone who needs it.

Carve-outs – the divestiture or sale of a division or business unit – are complex transactions which must clear a higher hurdle for success than typical mergers and acquisitions. Our solution provides you with all the features and functionalities you need in this situation. Our key accounts have relied on our platform to manage their carve-outs for years.

One of the main challenges in this phase is to capture all assets included in the carve-out in order to achieve stand-alone readiness and prepare the data room for the sale. Gathering all this data across the organization, including validation and requests for updates, is the most time-consuming and expensive phase of a carve-out project. The smartmerger.com Carve-Out Baselining App provides powerful features to gather data, whether from a small company or a huge international corporation. Request updates with ease until the data reaches the level of completeness you need. Connecting the data with other smartmerger.com apps enables you to generate contractual annexes, track data migration or separation activities, or set up und manage TSAs. The completed baseline data can be exported to a document and transferred to a classical VDR. To innovation-prone customers, smartmerger.com offers the option to grant the potential buyers access to the data lake itself, which accelerates the transaction process to lightning speed.

During due diligence, the seller provides sensitive information to the buyer’s team so it can make a well-informed decision about the purchase, including setting an appropriate purchase price and defining the contractual terms. In this dynamic process, additional data or information are often requested. The buyer’s team, usually composed of various subject-matter experts, needs to review and evaluate the data. smartmerger.com provides a due-diligence playbook that guides the buyer’s team through the process, helping them manage activities, capture risks and synergies and share data and documents internally. Ideally, the integrated smart VDR will be used by the seller to provide the documents to the buyer.

Going far beyond the classical VDR, smartmerger.com offers a fully digitalized due-diligence process. Rather than requesting documents from the seller, the buyer uses smart, structured online forms to request precise answers. In many cases these online forms are similar to Excel spreadsheets that can capture multiple data entries. smartmerger.comprovides powerful validations, workflows and integrated Q&As to accelerate the due-diligence process. Data can be linked directly to the due-diligence report to keep it up-to-date at all times. Integrated reporting and dashboard features ensure full transparency into the transaction status and degree of completeness.

During the integration phase, work must be distributed and the implementation progress must be tracked. smartmerger.com provides an application for planning and managing all activities throughout the integration phase, including day-one-readiness, 90/100 day completion and more. Dedicated applications help the buyer plan and monitor the realization of synergies.

One of our major clients uses the smartmerger.com platform for all its carve-out activities, no matter whether the unit being carved out is a small business entity or a major global division with thousands of employees. In the past this client used to run the entire process using Excel templates. While Excel is a very intuitive application requiring almost no user training, it reaches its limits when used in a collaborative, multi-user setting, making it extremely difficult to ensure consistency and proper version control.

smartmerger.com^® has created two applications providing a user experience similar to Excel but using online spreadsheets. Data request templates are provided online and distributed to the local team based on pre-defined workflows. Not a single document needs to be circulated physically. The centralized team can validate the data and request changes or updates. All data is available and accessible in real-time. Progress and completion dashboards ensure full status transparency.

Integrated logic checks drive data quality. The smartmerger.com platform can boost efficiency by more than 30% by accelerating the process steps, increasing quality, supporting completeness tracking, lowering risks and reducing overhead.

The smartmerger.com^® platform was natively designed and built for mergers & acquisitions. Operating in this space means dealing with very sensitive and confidential data. Our clients trust that we protect their data from unauthorized access, whether from outside or from within the team. Applying the need-to-know principle, we have established a fine-granular permission and access control system enabling the client to restrict data access and processing precisely to those who are in charge. You define which users can access what data during a particular project phase, and for what processing activities (e.g. editing, deleting, downloading).

But for smartmerger.com, security starts even earlier. Every one of our developers codes with security in mind. We conduct frequent code and security reviews, internal and external security audits and penetration tests. We practice pair programming and use automated security tests. All our client-facing contacts are experts at dealing with sensitive data. We have adopted a security policy and run frequent security training classes. Protecting our working environment, infrastructure and data is second nature even to our back-office, administrative and marketing staff who abide by the strictest data privacy rules.

M&A is not about using a particular platform or application. The success or failure of an M&A project is highly dependent on people – your experts, advisors, consultants, executives, and how you get your employees behind the transaction.

The complexity of M&A transactions has increased significantly in recent years. More and more domains are subject to due diligence; the depth of investigation into each domain has increased, and with it the amount of data to be analyzed and the number of people involved. The compliance and regulatory requirements have tightened while clients are expecting to deliver M&A projects faster and at lower cost. All this puts enormous pressure on the team.

Increasing your efficiency frees up time and budget for your high-priority tasks. A faster transaction saves you money and lets you start reaping the benefits of the synergies you have created sooner.

Caring is one of our core values. When everyone contributes, we can make a global impact. The impact of this caring attitude can be seen in many areas.

Our team pushed to re-assess whether our data center providers are using renewable energy. Our back-office asked to change our own energy provider. But living our values is more than that. We stopped using disposable plastics and plastic bottles. We use local water suppliers instead. We use bikes (not e-bikes) as much as possible to commute to work. We reduced our printing, and when we have to print, we use recycled paper. Our coffee is from fair trade, and we prefer organic and healthy food.

Other global challenges have their root cause in how we interact with each other, in particular when it comes to respect and diversity. We are proud in smartmerger.com’s diverse team whose members hail from different countries and cultures. We are proud of our team spirit which we can see in action every day. It shows when someone steps in to help a colleague who is struggling, or in the way we share knowledge, respect different opinions and celebrate each others’ successes.

Last but not least, as digital natives we could not resist the temptation of performing an SDG and ESG assessment to measure our performance against the sustainability goals to reassure ourselves and our clients. The assessment results will be available in our content store soon.