The future of virtual data rooms: the all-in-one deal platform

Sponsored by Virtual Vaults

Dealmakers are searching for new ways to boost their success during the M&A cycle – and all-in-one deal technology could be the answer

Virtual data rooms are secure, fast, and easy to use, so it’s no surprise that deal makers are increasingly adopting them. They offer an efficient and dependable way to store, share and manage their data 24/7 from anywhere with an internet connection.

For mergers and acquisitions, virtual data rooms have never been more important – particularly when Covid-19 put a stop to face-to-face business in 2021, a year that saw an unprecedented number of M&A deals announced worldwide. More than 62,000 deals were reported, showing an extraordinary 24 per cent growth from 2020. However, this huge boom in the M&A sector showed signs, during the first half of 2022, of returning to “normal”. Registered deals in Q1 2022 were lower than every quarter in 2021.

The pandemic has accelerated dealmakers’ use of technology to increase productivity. As a result, the demand for secure and efficient data storage, sharing and collaboration solutions, as well as the need for organisations to comply with stringent regulatory requirements, has exploded. Constant improvements are being made to tailor to the needs of individual companies. But with the guarantee of additional security and an efficient way to store and share information, what is next?

Increasing need for an all-in-one deal platform

Virtual data rooms have evolved from simple information storage to tools that help facilitate an entire deal. They have revolutionised the due diligence process of every dealmaker, but what about deal preparation? This is something we understand at Virtual Vaults.

Advisors need to be as prepared as possible when it comes down to deal management – and they need a tool for managing the dealmaking lifecycle, from preparation to archive. This needs to be front and centre, supported by one centralised platform which all collaborators can access.

To that end, Virtual Vaults has evolved the entire concept of the data room. What was once simply a secure online data repository is now an all-in-one platform that transforms the dealmaking lifecycle, enabling dealmakers to prepare, make and secure their deals, all in one place. Welcome to the world of Virtual Vaults’ Workspaces.

Organisation

Deal preparation technology can help dealmakers organise and streamline their deal with a quick and easy set-up process. Wasting time with manual folder structures is a thing of the past – with Workspaces, you can significantly reduce the risk of human error by selecting a pre-created template or by uploading your own folder structure template in seconds. With the trend of global deals increasing month-on-month, many deals in the pipeline are being prepared simultaneously. Therefore, deal preparation has never been more important among teams and organisations – and with Workspaces, you can manage access by inviting both colleagues and guests to join for seamless and secure collaboration.

Collaboration

Your data and document collection can now be tracked within Workspaces. It enables you to collaborate efficiently with colleagues through interactive data collection and via a secure integrated chat. This eliminates the use of spreadsheets being emailed back and forth to see which documents have been collected and will hugely contribute to the reduction in data breach risks within deal preparation.

This functionality within Workspaces allows easy uploading and tracking of document collection from “to-dos” and “in progress” right through to “review” and “done”. Alongside the internal chat, this provides a single source of truth for all users involved in the deal, saving hours of manual labour and streamlining the entire preparation process to keep your deal on track and all in one place.

Redaction

Ahead of any due diligence, redaction remains an important yet time-consuming and exhausting task, where the removal of private commercial information or sensitive personal data must be undertaken for the sake of regulatory compliance.

With Workspaces, gone are the days where downloading hundreds, sometimes thousands, of documents before uploading them into a secure data room was the norm. Workspaces provides a fast, smooth, trustworthy alternative where you can collaborate with colleagues by working on the same document, making it quicker to identify all sensitive data and review each other’s redactions. Furthermore, you can optimise your process with an assisted automated search function built into Workspaces, which can redact the same occurrence within a document in one click.

Export

Management of the entire M&A process is crucial to the success of a deal, and being able to prepare that deal and export all documents and data into a secure virtual data room, all on the same platform, is the future of data room technology. This not only maintains and protects the high level of security needed when sharing sensitive data, it also speeds up the overall process giving you complete control to work faster and more efficiently.

With the world of dealmaking ever-evolving, and with increased security threats, adopting the right technology to manage the entire M&A process efficiently is critical for companies and advisors to stay ahead of the curve. Learn more about Virtual Vaults’s new all-in-one platform for deal makers: make preparation part of your deal and request access to Workspaces today.

By Rowena Nathan, Digital Content Manager, Virtual Vaults