What it means to be essential for M&A

Rusty Wiley (00:00:00) To be essential, you have to cover the entire deal life cycle for M&A. 00:00:04 The pursuit of alpha, with all the technology and all the AI capabilities, has not gotten easier. It’s probably gotten more complex. 00:00:12 You have an abundance of tools. You have a mountain of content. 00:00:16 In particular with what we’ve done with Grata and Blueflame, we’ve created the ability to do research and deep analytics, not just for the buyer, but for the investment bank to help companies prepare for doing a transaction. We flow directly through that into doing the actual M&A transaction and diligence. 00:00:32 And then we have governance capabilities with our Sherpany platform to support decision making around M&A. 00:00:38 So we describe essential M&A infrastructure as being that backbone and that platform that allows you to conduct all of those opportunities from inception all the way through integration. 00:00:47 The fact that we have been in financial services and M&A for over 60 years, with a brand that is trusted around confidentiality and protection of confidential assets, is the perfect platform for us to enter the next era of agentic AI. 00:01:02 We think our foundation of being a trusted vault, if you will, for that type of information is super relevant going forward. 00:01:10 We had created each of the individual components that were necessary to support and facilitate what we described as M&A infrastructure. 00:01:17 What we discovered is that building best of breed platforms on each of those dimensions was not the best way to serve our clients. 00:01:23 It was really creating almost islands of AI automation that were not connected. 00:01:27 And it was creating fragmented content sourced from different sources. 00:01:31 Bringing those together allows clients to have a much better experience. It also allows you to take that content and those insights and move it from the inception of a deal all the way through the conclusion of a deal. 00:01:43 This is really not about just adding AI to our product set. It’s about making deal intelligence actionable for our clients. 00:01:49 And we’ve put that together into a package that really allows our clients to operate in a seamless, smart, fast way to execute transactions and frankly, do what they’re all trying to do: get better outcomes on M&A deals. 00:02:02 Datasite delivering an end-to-end trusted M&A infrastructure that has all the steps of executing a transaction from inception all the way through conclusion really does move us into a position where we give our clients total capital command.