Firms undergoing a merger or acquisition or seeking capital from private investors should be ready for an operational due diligence (ODD) review. Most commonly used in financial firms, particularly by hedge funds and other investment firms, and in industrial M&A deals, an ODD can also benefit retail organizations and any business. There are many…
Zip files are a fast and easy option when you want to protect files from being accessed by casual users. While the technology behind them is quite old, and they don’t have the security required to protect extremely sensitive information, they’re great for compressing and sharing large amounts of data in easy-to-transport folders. The Dangers…
Anyone who takes the time to create a PDF file usually wants the contents to be protected to some extent. If you didn’t care about anyone tampering with the document, you would simply share the Word document or Excel spreadsheet. Unfortunately, today changing the contents of a PDF is something anyone can do using Microsoft…
Capital calls are an essential instrument of private equity, and occur with regularity between investment firms and their limited partners. In essence, they are mobilizations of capital prompted by the firm and funded by the investors. Historically, they have been used primarily by real estate funds, but they are becoming more commonplace across all types…
by David Weedmark For years, VDRs have been the standard for mergers and acquisitions. The same qualities that make them ideal for organizing, accessing and sharing information in a secure and confidential manner during M&As have also made them ideal for investment banks to manage their own information and banking transactions. Why Banks Use…
The practice of combining (or merging) two different companies certainly sounds easy enough in theory; however, in virtually every instance there is much more to the transaction than is visible on the surface. Every occurrence of a merger and acquisition (commonly abbreviated as M&A) has its own unique nuances, and their success depends on a…
The ability to safely and securely integrate video conferencing into your Virtual Data Room (VDR) is paramount. Because using a VDR obviously indicates that your organization has highly sensitive data to protect (such as in an M&A), the video conferencing solution you choose to use alongside it must have the same robust security requirements. …
Virtual Data Rooms: An Informational Guide What Are They, How Do You Use Them, and Why Are They Taking the Industry By Storm What is a Virtual Data Room? Let’s back up: What was a physical data room? Let’s start with a basic question: How do businesses share information? First, there was physical communication, where…
Bolt-On and Tuck-In Acquisitions What is a Bolt-On Acquisition? A bolt-on acquisition refers to when a private equity firm attaches a smaller company to a larger “platform” company. This platform company will have a strong presence in the market with an intact and maneuverable management structure, economies of scale, infrastructure and all of the things…
Document Retention and How It Can Help Your Business According to newly revised rules from the US government, document retention and a good document retention policy is essential. Document retention refers to the way that companies can retain, review and destroy documents possessed and created by the business. What is a Document Retention Policy? A…