Virtual Data Room for Mergers and Acquisitions
Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) are a challenging undertaking for any company. One company lays out their entire business in a format that is easy to absorb and analyze for potential investors/buyers. There is a sea of paperwork involved (literal and virtual), recycled requests for each phase in exploratory, pre-marketing, due diligence, and post-merger integration. The simple solution to all of that is Folderit’s Virtual Data Room for Mergers and Acquisition.
Why do we need a virtual data room for Mergers and Acquisitions?
During a merger, all aspects of a company need to be analyzed in a way that protects the interests of both parties. This is called due diligence. This stage can involve many stakeholders including (but not limited to):
- Buyers
- Sellers
- Finance Team
- HR Manager
- Accountants
- Auditors
- Project Managers
This requires going over a lot of company information that would be deemed private, and not to be risked floating around. Until virtual data room for M&A came about, this entire process was conducted on-premises to contain the flow of sensitive information.
Securely Store and share documents
Folderit is built to be secure. It is protected by a 256-bit bank-level encryption that keeps all your content as accessible as you want, but only for authorized users. Folderit also transfers documents via secure SSL encryption, to keep any unwanted eyes away from your content. Folderit also facilitates your password policy in terms of strength and how frequently your users are required to change theirs.
However, the idea is to keep items safe, not to restrict access. To accomplish this, Folderit facilitates permissions for users and user-groups that allow varying degrees of access to content from complete/full to view-only, or if you want, none at all. All file-access is logged in an audit-trail, so you know which user accessed which file at what time.
In Folderit’s VDR for M&A, you can set up your permissions such that your stakeholders gain access to relevant content while concealing other information they don’t need to have (say, for example, employees’ personal information).
With permissions, you can rest-assured that only users or user-groups you have granted authorized access will be able to view your content.
Also, Folderit configures automatic retention. That way, you don’t have to worry about tidying up after a deal. You can set up an expiry date on your documents and they will cease to exist after that time has elapsed. This can also come in handy for legal reasons where document retention for a certain time-period is a requirement.
Easy collaboration
The biggest advantage of using Folderit as a virtual data room for mergers and acquisitions being so secure and safe, is that stakeholders can view their content from virtually any web-enabled device with a working internet connection. This way, key-players and stakeholders can develop strategies for however they want to integrate the acquired assets into their workflows without taking up your company’s space or time.
Additionally, with Folderit’s robust search capabilities, even the most complex folder structures and archives can be indexed and searched through using meta data, custom meta data and OCR. Not only does Folderit find your content by name and metadata, it can also scan the contents to ensure you get what you are looking for. With OCR you can even scan read-only documents such as images, scanned documents, PDF files or something else entirely.
Folderit also supports an approval workflow that can prove crucial for negotiations. If you have a document that needs a green light from multiple stakeholders, you can set it up such that they can either give their approval all at once, or through an hierarchy of your choice (for example, before committing to any financial transactions, you need your CFO and CEO to sign-off).
Final Thoughts
VDR for M&A need to do more than just provide a secure space for parties to transact. Using all of Folderit’s features, you can get a bird’s eye view of the entire process. You can gauge which stakeholders are spending time on which file(s) – through audit trails and try to predict potential problems or roadblocks and strategize a solution to intercept that. Folderit works to make sure you get the job done.