“We are in a hurry. Build a ‘Ready to Transact’ M&A Funnel for my mandates in 3 weeks! Or less.”

This has been the primary ask; against complex mandates across technology, people, geography, and valuation boundaries. Other expectations were to get rich information about the target deals, with discreet and smooth progression into due diligence for fast transactions.

Each mandate needed a lot of preparation because the customer had very precise requirements about the technology, the founder's background, location, client information, and readiness to transact. Unit economics is now FinTech's biggest problem, and each mandate is designed to improve it via either growing its client base, enhancing its tech product capabilities, expanding into new markets, or forming strategic alliances.

The aim was to provide high-quality transaction choices through scheduled submissions while acting as an outsourced corporate development partner. But sorting through and pre-verifying technical knowledge was the most difficult part. It was necessary to go through layers of marketing language and jargon to get an unbiased opinion regarding a fitting mandate. Simplicity in "search, sort, and speak" database operations with a timeliness focus is a bad strategy.

With new mandates incoming every few weeks, the challenge was to find a scaleable and accurate method of sourcing quality deals.

“We partnered with GrowthPal as our inorganic growth partner to identify potential targets for not only our acquisitions but also strategic investments and partnerships. We gave them multiple mandates that were a mix of acquisitions and investments to augment our product as well as expand our customer base and geography presence.”

These demanding mandates were pre-processed for the “mandate universe” from the deep and multi-source data lake at GrowthPal. AI/ML algorithms whittled down the list to an actionable shortlist; parsing through all information about the sellers across public and private domains. This shortlist was curated by GrowthPal analysts for qualitative fitment and readiness to transact at that point. Such deals were presented to the Bank as “ready to transact deals”. Out of these about 75% of them were accepted by the Bank against an industry average of 35-40%. A quick turnaround with a large number of possible deals was an immediate impact from GrowthPal.

“We were very impressed with their ability to bring the RIGHT target on the table with RIGHT intent across our mandates. They have soon become our go-to deal sourcing partner.”

How did the GrowthPal IB team do it?

The team quickly zeroed in on the first important step for success - building a deeper understanding of the mandates. Using a proprietary framework, they outlined the requirements at their most practical level of granularity over two working sessions. These yardsticks were used to build (and curate) shortlists. Given the stringent requirements, the “mandate universe” was not high. But with this focus on requirement elicitation, the GrowthPal team was confident with a “better fit to mandate”.

The depth of data on the GrowthPal platform, backed by AI/ML algorithms, was the other key contributing factor. GrowthPal has the database to identify those "1 in 20,000" firms thanks to a regularly updated data lake of more than 2 million startups and algorithms for verifying several contextual and semantic rules. To ensure that the Bank’s Corp Dev Team only had to handle the one shortlisted over several rounds, Analyst Curation used further refinement to deliver "2 per 100".

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“Being in a niche vertical coupled with our inhouse Corp Dev team and a steady flow of inbound leads, we were quite skeptical of the value add from the GrowthPal team. They proved us wrong with their first set of ‘target recommendations’ that made us realize that we have barely scratched the surface. They have been our inorganic growth partner for more than 2 years now and we look forward to a long-term relationship.”