Using Ideals to securely and efficiently run 50 deals from 1 to 30MEuro every year

Overview

Founded in 2000, Eurallia Finance has rapidly become France’s biggest provider of advisory services for acquisitions, divestitures, and fundraisings, providing specialized services to an impressive range of industries and corporate profiles. 

They first chose Ideals to conduct a buy-side transaction securely and were immediately hooked by the high level of control, which made them quickly extend the platform to all their financial operations, such as audits, sell-side, and fundraising.

Being involved in roughly 50 transactions yearly, from 1 to 30 million euros each, Eurallia has seen Ideals’ marked impact on the firm’s clients, buyers, investment funds, and consultants’ experience. Since implementing the VDR, “we’ve been getting extremely positive feedback about our services’ quality, security, and professionality. Ideals has contributed a lot to improve our corporate image and the quality of our work.”

The Context

With 15 partners and 18 regional offices, Eurallia Finance, advises managers and shareholders on their sale, acquisition, and fundraising deals. They identify suitable targets and advise on how to approach them, create an appropriate strategy and make all the necessary arrangements for financing. 

Eurallia’s President and Partner, Fabienne Hanras, who has been working with the firm for the outstanding mark of 15 years, has always been keen for the firm to try out new technologies as a means to improve services and grow the business, that’s what first took them to Ideals.

Key Challenges

Having used several solutions for exchanging documents with their lawyers and with buyers, including other VDRs for audit, Eurallia’s team was unhappy with the security levels and functionality and decided to look for more sophisticated technology that would allow them to:

• Centralize all confidential documents securely
• Easily access and organize documents 
• Fully track all activities at any time
• Control access to potential clients’ lawyers and advisors.

Having first experimented Ideals as a facilitator for a large buy-side deal, Fabienne rapidly concluded that Ideals was more secure and had better functionality than others they looked at – “Ideals was definitely more complete, more intuitive, and cost-effective. The platform has many useful features compared to the different tools that we used to work with in the past.” 

Solution

While executing other deals and setting up new dossiers for audits, Fabienne and her team tried out the additional Ideals’ features, such as:

• The drag and drop to copy over files structures quickly
• The watermarks to increase control over data
• The automatic index and centralization of the documents so the lawyers and buyers’ could access the same information
• The Q&A module to ensure confidentiality during the projects. 

The Q&A was especially useful for conducting due diligence when the legal team was very concerned about emails’ security levels. With the tool, Fabienne could designate the client as Q&A Coordinator, and they continued to collaborate without interruptions. This saved a lot of time and inspired confidence in all the users.

“These features helped us delegate efficiently, I love discovering new ways to use the product along my journey with Ideals. It’s like you are always pleasantly surprised,” Fabienne concluded.

The Future

Throughout time, Eurallia keeps finding more valuable features that are easy to learn and optimize clients’ experience, and they will undoubtedly continue to use Ideals going forward. In fact, Fabienne suggested that now is a good time for her buyers to go on a refresher course to make sure they can use the platform to its full potential.

“Ideals has contributed a lot to improving our corporate image and the quality of our work. Unfortunately, when everyone else gets Ideals, we’ll have to find another way to beat the competition,” laughed Fabienne.