Financial Due Diligence Provider of the Year
Alvarez & Marsal
A&M’s EMEA Transaction Advisory Group (“TAG”) practice distinguishes itself as a highly client centric, senior led team that operates as a single platform across EMEA providing Financial Due Diligence, SPA and pricing advisory services, and Data Analytics. We work closely with our colleagues that provide tax, operational, IT, commercial and regulatory due diligence services, to provide integrated diligence in complex situations.
We are experienced operators who are hands on in the way we serve clients. Our Partners (MDs) are actively involved in the day-to-day delivery on projects and the experience of due diligence teams means our work is focused from the outset on key process requirements. Where needed, we deploy market leading data analytics to meet client needs.
Our focus continues to be on providing high-quality advice and building long term client relationships. This is evidenced by the fact that we increased our EMEA revenue by 15% over the review period compared to the broader M&A market decline. We worked with 184 PE clients during the period (of which 40% were new).
Our investment in our high quality team is a key factor contributing to this success. We grew our EMEA headcount by 18% and made 3 internal partner promotes.
BDO
Our PE FDD focus exemplifies BDO’s strategy, summarised as BUILD (Brand, Unifying Culture, International, Leading the Markets and Digital Innovations). It is why, despite the economic downturn and unsurprising reduced PE deal volume, our average deal value increased by £10m.
The driver behind our Brand is client-centricity, ensuring we constantly understand their needs. We support this through regular client listening programmes as well as independent published surveys. This has enabled us to maintain recurring deal relationships with our 30+ key and managed accounts.
Our Unifying Culture encourages people to ‘be themselves’, work together and deliver exceptional customer service – to be as successful as they can. This is evidenced by our sponsorship of Private Equity People breakfast series and thriving internal Women’s Forum.
A strong network of International member firms enables us to readily engage and support cross- border transactions. Despite the current economic landscape, over 54% of our deals remain cross- border.
We continue to Lead the markets we focus on, evidenced by >100 deals completed in a challenging macro-environment. With significant investment in sector teams (eg Life Sciences, Financial Services and ESG) we look to further growth.
With a Digital mindset, we focus on embracing a culture of innovation, eg. our Business Lens diagnostic to help deliver valuable insights to our clients’/AE, and >80% of deals now utilise our data analytics capabilities.
Grant Thornton
The Grant Thornton team has continued to positively progress their PE deals practice throughout the past 12 months despite challenging market conditions. Completing 101 deals with a combined value of over £2.7bn, spanning international territories and multiple sectors often with significant complexity. As well documented the deals market has contracted following the post covid boom and we are returning to pre-2020 levels. This has resulted in a lower aggregate value comparative to the prior year which had been boosted by significant super deals across TMT and healthcare.
As leading advisors to the mid-market, we consistently adapt our style, differentiating on delivery and maximising value for our clients. This is one of the reasons why our PE clients keep coming back to us – in fact 80% of our clients this year are valued, repeat clients of ours.
We pride ourselves on being partner-led, building relationships and working hand-in-hand with stakeholders. Through our breadth of experience, we flex our FDD services considering deal size, involved parties, reporting needs and market factors. We develop innovative capability offerings from standard due diligence through to niche and specific reporting, to drive value for our clients.
A strong example of this is our work on the MCR Outsourcing deal. We acted as an integrated buy-side adviser - for Freshstream Investment Partners & MCR providing sector expertise across FDD -lead advisory, tax DD, IT DD, SPA & modelling.