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.

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