Growth through mergers and other strategic partnerships is often a key component in our portfolio companies’ strategy. Throughout the years we have participated in 70+ software companies and we have enabled and supported over 30+ mergers. Management of our portfolio companies and ourselves have gained much valuable experience in the integration of mergers, just by doing. We have collected our experience in a specifically for the software industry designed handbook and associated templates.
Our portfolio companies are using our handbook and templates to optimize their integration processes and avoid common pitfalls. A recent example from our portfolio is the merge of Cleversoft and BusinessForensics starting September 30th 2020.
cleversoft group, founded in 2004, is a leading cloud-based RegTech provider for financial services. Cleversoft provides digital solutions to more than 300 financial institutions around the globe.
BusinessForensics, headquartered in The Hague, provides proprietary financial and economic crime prevention solutions to banks, financial institutions and insurance companies since 2010.
The acquisition of BusinessForensics marks the second step in cleversoft‘s buy and build strategy after the combination with the risk and regulatory reporting expert SecondFloor in 2019.
Florian Clever (CEO & founder of cleversoft) explains the reasoning behind the merge: “ […] Together we form a leading player in a market with vast potential going forward, as regulatory compliance has become a pivotal component for all financial institutions.”
Integration strategy
Having a solid vision on the strategic rationale of the cooperation that is shared by all key stakeholders is crucial to successfully realizing synergies. The cooperation between cleversoft and BusinessForensics is highly complementary both from a product and customer perspective, as the new solution has already been demanded by numerous existing customers of cleversoft.
Technological fit
A strong technological fit enables realization of synergies. The cooperation strengthens both cleversoft as well as BusinessForensics software suites along the compliance lifecycle. This is realized by providing increasingly important functionalities to their customers as governmental scrutiny is putting more pressure on financial institutions to comply with KYC/AML regulations. The fact that both companies are using similar development platforms facilitates integration of suites.
Organizational fit
There is a strong cultural fit between both companies’ management and key staff. Much time was invested in getting to know each other and explore future cooperation. Involve key stakeholders to develop a new organization chart (if required) to ensure commitment and support for the cooperation.
Execution
Execution is key to any successful cooperation. Synergies between cleversoft and BusinessForensics are realized through the execution of a jointly developed 100-day action plan. Involvement, support and commitment of all key stakeholders is crucial to actually make a cooperation work!
Learn more?
Learn more on our vision on successful mergers? Contact Christiaan Crouwers on +31 6 21193338 or christiaan@main.nl.
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