Financial Services, M&A, Private Equity
iKAN Virtual Document Center implementation to handle paper and electronic document collaboration for their financial dealings.
Mills & Stowell is a boutique investment bank that provides capital raising and financial advisory services to small cap middle market businesses. Fairway Capital, the investment arm of Mills & Stowell, is a $100MM mezzanine fund that provides subordinated debt to small cap, privately owned, middle market companies. The capital provided by the Company is used to fund internal growth, strategic acquisitions, recapitalizations (including restructuring, generation ownership transfers and cash out facilities), leveraged buyouts and management buyouts.
The Company’s business is focused on business transactions, which occur over months and sometimes years of time. Each transaction has collaboration needs, beginning with initial due diligence and continuing through the close of the transaction. During this process, different parties need access to different levels of document based information. In addition, transaction sequence requires certain documents to be delivered and executed on strict timelines – missing a deadline can be very costly. Additionally, copying costs for a relatively simple transaction can exceed $3,000. At the end of the transaction, multiple copies of all due diligence and closing documents must be distributed to several parties. It is not uncommon for a single transaction to include a dozen or more participants at any given time, especially in the early deal stages.
The iKAN Virtual Document Center proved to be a perfect solution to Fairway’s document control needs. The Software as a Service delivery allows them to pay as they go – in heavy transaction times they can add additional users, and then remove them when the transaction is complete. They can control who sees what documents, allowing different users access only to information that pertains to them. The company has eliminated delays in delivering due diligence information. It has saved the company countless hours of tedious paper handling work and freed them up to spend more time on their core business functions.
By far the most interesting result is that through the process, Mills & Stowell/ Fairway Capital is now learning more information about the parties in the transaction than they did before – which gets them closer to their customers and in understanding their needs. Their customers have commented that the firm’s process is organized and efficient, and that the convenience factor has been noticed.