A cross industry perception on avenues of digitalization of merger & acquisition execution

Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) decisions are one of the key strategic initiatives of a firm that decides the growth trajectory of the firm and puts financial leverage borne through the years. The execution of M&A process, however, is still largely non-digitized because the decisions concerning this have high impact and have to eventually be wetted by executives manually anyway. M&A Execution Process has been unanimously agreed to have bottlenecks revolving around its low level of digitization that contribute to the M&A process being slow and relatively inefficient. This paper focuses on finding possible avenues of innovation in the entire M&A process that have either been executed in certain industries/parts, are under review for implementation or are mere ideas that seem feasible in terms of adjacent implementations or industry perception. This is an attempt to evaluate the role of digitization in different aspects of a M&A Deal process to achieve increase in speed or increase in the level of detail and efficiency achievable through involvement of digital tools and extended to how this can contribute to enhanced success rate of M&A deals. The research conducted is a mix of primary and secondary research design to frame a continuous and reliable opinion on innovative digitization methods in M&A Mixed methodology has been followed where stakeholders involved in M&A processes like buyer company, seller company and enablers like M&A Consultants, Investment Bankers, Financing Bankers have been interviewed and secondary data has been referred to arrive at various facets of digitalization possible in M&A process. It was found out as the industry perception that Digitalization of various phases of M&A deal lifecycle has been proven to significantly improve lengthy M&A life cycles and authenticity. Major areas of M&A that were found to have the highest scope of digitalization are Target Screening, Stakeholder Management & Communication enhancement, Organizational design, Purchase Accounting, Divestiture financials processing, TSAs, Data & Contract Management, Administration and Project Management. Different processes of M&A Execution have been found to have different ways of digitization / Automation, while all contributing to one single aim of higher speed or efficiency which has been discussed in detail in the paper. This will eventually help explore ways in which digitization can be used to result in better decisions and outcomes for a typical M&A process and how adequate digitization of the M&A planning and execution process can transform the M&A outcomes and efficiency.