Investment bankers play a key role in most Virtual Data Rooms. Their role matching companies and assets with bidders and driving the M&A transaction is critical to make deals happen. Investment bankers normally create significant value to their clients, specially when they focus on one specific industry for many years and are able to read and sometimes even set M&A trends. Based on fourteen years of experience running Virtual Data Room processes, we have noticed that investment bankers play a crucial role to make the deal happen by:
Physical data rooms are quickly being replaced by virtual data rooms, partly because of the complex procedures that are necessary to protect the information held in these rooms. Having confidential deal information in a specific location means that the parties in a deal need to travel to and from the location each time they view documents, which also results in high costs associated with transport, accommodation, premises and security. Another complex issue is the on-site management of the venue, which needs to be restricted to only those who are essential to the due diligence process. Use of Virtual Data Rooms has considerably evolved over the years over its Physical counterpart in many ways.
Let’s take a closer look at the procedures involved in using a physical data room.
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We have been providing Data Room Services in Japan for a while now. Today, we are very happy to introduce our Japan dedicated website!
It is an honor to share an award for excellence in Virtual Data Room services with leading companies. Congratulations to our fellow competitors Intralinks and Merrill Datasite for the recent awards they received from the reputed magazine Acquisition Internation.
I was invited last week to share with a group of MBA students our perspectives on the history of Virtual Data Rooms. This is a brief compilation of what I shared with them on my experience in this business line. Experience, you see, is a precious commodity because someone was present, involved and personally learned from an event – and hence can share their story first hand to let people relate to it in much better way.
Starting from the humble beginnings when the world’s first VDR was created and used for Debt Underwriting, the industry has grown significantly. VDRs have become the norm in almost all transactions that are in the due diligence phase substituing Physical Data Rooms. But back then, it was a whole different story as the people were reluctant to shift from traditional Datarooms to a Online one. Lets have a look at some of the challeneges that the industry faced when it was nascent .
Virtual Datarooms have changed a lot in the last 10 years. From rarity to almost commodity. Something that was very complicated now seems much easier with the wide availability of file sharing and also the creation of cheap providers that define themselves as datarooms.
Prior to my role as a Virtual Data Room Consultant, I had the opportunity to work on a number of M&A transactions which required a significant amount of data sharing between parties. This was the time when physical Data rooms were still the first option for most of the transactions and virtual datarooms were still very rare. The first time we used a virtual data room, the costs went significantly over our initial estimates. We were very surprised with how quickly the total fee charged by the dataroom provider ballooned to a cost that we were uncomfortable with.
Social engineering is probably the biggest threat for your confidential information. We as dataroom providers spend a very significant amount of time making sure that our professionals are well versed in the tricks that can take down the most secure systems.
"How do you as a Virtual Data provider destroy your documents? What should I do to destroy our data?" A very good client asked us this question the other day.
