In a recent TechBlast article titled “Why DealCloud is the real deal,” award-winning dealmaker, Jonathan Boyers, explains how technology has transformed the M&A industry. Boyers, head of corporate finance for KPMG in the UK and a DealCloud client, oversees a division that has just reported turnover of £68 million on 80 deals for the 12 months ending September 2021, compared with £29m and 45 deals when he took over in 2017.
Boyers has forged a formidable reputation for hard work, however he credits DealCloud for transforming a sector he’s worked in for more than 30 years. KPMG in the UK introduced DealCloud in October 2020 in the mergers and acquisitions business. While speaking at Robert Walters’ recent ‘Deal or No Deal’ event, Boyers shared the following insights:
“DealCloud is an investment banking-specific execution platform. All our deals are executed on DealCloud but it’s also a CRM system. All our targets and origination activities are on DealCloud as well. Whenever we show a deal to a buyer or a private equity house, it automatically updates the CRM for those buyers. Our people are all on DealCloud as well so we can see who’s attached to what jobs. Because we know what stage every job is up to, we can work out how busy everyone was because there are peaks and troughs in our game.”
KPMG’s corporate finance team in the UK employs 240 professionals, all of which are on DealCloud. According to Boyers, his team has so much more information about what everyone is doing and where they are with all their different clients and relationships. DealCloud also produces a lot of management information and data analytics about their business. Boyers says that his team understands their business literally five times better than they did a year ago.
“There’s efficiency and improved origination activity and communication. If somebody goes out and meets the chairman of a business we’ll know they’ve done that (and it) will connect with someone who saw the CEO a week earlier.”
Before DealCloud, Boyers says they relied on the information being shared through meetings and Excel spreadsheets. The Big Four accountant used the downturn at the start of the pandemic to implement the technology. Explaining how DealCloud improves their processes, Boyers says DealCloud enables them to track the behavior of bidders, including private equity houses.
“We can see how many deals we’ve shown them. We can see how the PE houses have behaved. We can see how often they’ve bid, when they’ve bid, if they bid in the first round, did they bid in the second round, did the bid go up or down, did they complete at the same price as they did in the second round? At the press of a button we can run off the analytics for that. When people say ‘you don’t want to talk to them because they always chip their price’ we can prove whether that’s the case or not and often they didn’t.”
Click here to read the full article on TechBlast.
To learn more about how KPMG in the UK transformed its business by leveraging DealCloud, download our case study here.
To learn more about DealCloud for M&A teams, schedule a demo.