How many passwords do you have? When was the last time you changed it? Do you use your daughter´s birth date or your name written backwards?We all have an increasing number of passwords for all the websites we access on a frequent basis. Having a safe and easy system to set and maintain passwords is key to keep information secure. Keeping a secure but

The last few weeks have been very intense in the Virtual Data Room industry worldwide with in increasing number of transactions (finally).    There has been a significant change in the make up of the data room users with private equity becoming much more important in the buy side.Bloomberg has covered this in two recent articles from two different approaches.  The first one argues that

  According to a very interesting McKinsey Quarterly article, acquisitions are in general successful if they follow one of these objectives: Improve the target company’s performance Consolidate to remove excess capacity from industry Accelerate market access for the target’s (or buyer’s) products Get skills or technologies faster or at lower cost than they can be built Pick winners early and help them develop their businesses

Vanity Fair just published an educative article with the 7 steps to set up a hedge fund.  Very entertaining reading.  Missing one step.Step 2.5. Get simple technology infrastructure. Including a good analytics/CRM package (Pertrac for example) and an market leading reporting and document sharing platform to manage all the flow of documents to and from potential investors.

Very interesting articles in the WSJ Deal Blog, and Reuters about the  FSA´s drive to stop deal leaks caused by reporters in transaction.In a recently published Market Watch report (read full report here) the FSA published its findings after 3 years of research on market leaks with recommendations to deal with communications with the media during a transaction.  Among other things, they include recording all calls and

Virtual data rooms (VDRs) have become the norm in the due diligence stage in most M&A transactions, substituting the traditional paper-based data rooms (see Know-how article “Virtual data rooms: the due diligence evolution”). However, in the last two years, the use of VDRs has expanded dramatically: both deeper in the M&A process and beyond M&A transactions. We believe that this shift in the role of Virtual

The Hedge Fund Transparency Act of 2009 has changed how funds report to their investors significantly increasing the risk of confidential data leaks.  There have been a number of well publicized events in which hedge fund position data was posted on public forums!Asian Investor has a very interesting article about the use of Virtual Data Room technology to minimize this risk. Enjoy!

Last Friday marked the coming of age for the Virtual Dataroom Services sector with the first IPO of a pure-play VDR provider.Congratulations to Intralinks on its IPO. Intralinks has been one of our main competitors in most markets for almost ten years.As Bloomber covered last week, the capital raised was mainly to fund the partial repayment of the debt it took in 2007.This is a

Interesting article by Paul Siegenthaler author of the highly recommended book "Perfect M&As" about the 10 main reasons for M&A failure.Paul highlights poor due diligence as one of the key factors that make M&A transactions fail. I cannot agree more. In the last 20 years I have participated in a number of transactions in which value was destroyed due to poor due diligence.The main reasons

In general, you should consider engaging a virtual dataroom (VDR) provider to share and control documents with an outside party while maintaining confidentiality and being able to track access to a given document. In particular some of the areas you should focus on are: Preparing documents for a transaction, especially when documents need to be put together from different sources and shared with different parties.