Deals can get stalled for virtually endless reasons. That’s why it’s important to minimize any potential problems on your end by staying organized, informed, and communicative throughout the whole process. That can be hard, but fortunately there is a growing number of apps geared toward M&A professionals to make their lives easier and their work more effective. Here are five to check out in 2016.
Deal Management App
Produced by Relevant, the Deal Management app is aimed mainly at private equity firms seeking and carrying out deals. It does everything from setting up a call center, to collecting due diligence documents, to moving parties through the deal pipeline. While use of the full features requires the desktop app, many functionalities are available on mobile, such as deal tracking, meeting preparation, and due diligence document access.
Finance Toolkit App
This is a comprehensive suite of investment spreadsheets and financial modeling templates aimed at advisers and businesses who are assessing the possible implications of a deal. This all comes in a format that’s touch-based and mobile friendly, making sometimes-tedious work as easy as writing a text message on your phone. It essentially gives you full analyst tools on the go, in meetings, and in preliminary discussions about deals.
Fund Raising and Investor Relations App
Another or Relevant’s offerings, this app helps with the fund raising and investor relations processes adjacent to many deals. It lets you find investors, import existing contacts and data, follow their activities, carry out due diligence, and more.
Mergermarket App
Created by the financial news service Mergermarket, this app offers virtually unparalleled access to real time M&A information. Ranging from state-of-the-market articles and major M&A news, to hard deal flow statistics, it’s basically a portal for everything you need to know to stay informed on the deal space. Full access requires a Mergermarket subscription, which can be very pricey, but also offers many other benefits beyond good reading.
MergersClub
Not a deal management app per se, MergersClub is designed to help buyers and sellers find each other using an interface similar to a dating website. M&A advisers list companies that are interested in selling or buying, offering anonymous descriptions of the companies for sale and the preferences of the acquiring companies. A novel idea when it was founded in 2012, it now boasts nearly 6,000 investment banks among its members and over 1,000 buy and sell share mandates.
DealNexus
Same in principle to MergersClub, DealNexus is another app designed to put buyers in touch with sellers, and assist the advisers in the middle. Calling itself “the largest global online deal sourcing platform,” it lists deals up to $500 million and has grown 50% year-over-year in deal profile volume since its inception in 2010. Since it’s owned by Intralinks, users have access to the company’s suite of products, most of which cost extra. The downside: Signing up means you can depend on plenty of calls and emails from sales reps who are ready to explain these products.
M&A Game
In a lot of ways, M&A is like a game – you’re trying to “beat” an opponent, in a sense, by getting the best price and terms for yourself, you’re employing strategy to attain that goal, and the thrill of the process can end up being quite addictive. Unfortunately, real life is not a game, and losing on big risks means actual, tangible losses for you. For anyone wants that rush without the consequences, there’s the M&A Game, which lets you take on the character of a business owner set on corporate domination. You build up a portfolio and identify companies to buy, sell, or merge with. Boasting 38,000 users, it now features multiplayer capabilities, making it more like World of Warcraft for M&A. The same caveat applies to this as DealNexus: It’s owned by Ansarada, so you can expect sales calls after you hand over your information.