FINQUEST: Technology to speed up private equity deals

Finquest does not take a commission for connecting institutional investors, corporate finance advisors, and private equity issuers on the lookout for M&A opportunities. For a flat fee starting at US$10,000 a year, its algorithms and market specialists will help a client to increase its network and speed up deal closure.

In an exclusive interview with NextInsight, Finquest CEO and co-founder, Tanguy Lesselin, explained how the big data firm balances confidentiality and transparency.

♦ Big data spews up more opportunities

A family office advisor may be looking for co-investors interested in education, healthcare, or digital businesses in Southeast Asia. An M&A advisor may be working on a mandate to sell an industrial company making $30 million in revenues, and on another which identifies acquisition opportunities for a multinational company. From such business requests, we identify and approach the right counterparties for them. “We use big data to identify those relevant connections. Being big data basically means that we source data from a wide variety of sources: from the usual suspects and well-known financial information databases to smaller data providers with a sector or geographical focus. We also crawl public content from the web for instance and also collect data from our clients directly.” - Tanguy Lesselin CEO Finquest (Photo by Sim Kih) Depending on what he or she is looking for, our client provides deal parameters like business sector, deal size, profitability, valuation, etc. Our algorithm matches these parameters with more than 1 million Asian companies and investors in our database to identify potential counterparties. The output is an “opportunity map”. There could be anywhere from 250 to over 1,000 companies on the map showing how many relevant businesses or investors there are in each country. For buy-side clients for instance, these parties could be companies, advisors carrying relevant deals, or private equity funds that have companies in their portfolio that they might exit soon. As revenue data for private companies is sometimes challenging to obtain from public sources or data providers, we also calculate an estimate based on the number of employees to identify more matches. From this opportunity map, we refine the search with our client. We then enter the curation phase and reach out to potential matches. Once we have validated their interest in engaging with our client, and that they would be interesting for our client, we will have both parties connected.

Confidentiality in deal process 

Family offices, for instance, are very secretive and do not want to advertise their investment strategy.

Finquest takes confidentiality and data security very seriously. We do not provide access to client data. We have stringent data security measures in place, and host our platform in Luxembourg with private banking data security standard. Thanks to these policies, our clients trust us and share with us critical information that is necessary to find the most relevant counterparties.

We only share our clients' identity when they accept being introduced to a potential prospective match.

We have a robust process. More than 80% of our recommended introductions are accepted --- they make contact and talk. Only less than 20% is rejected. The rejection could be because our client already knows them. Sometimes it is because there is a conflict of interest between our client and the shortlisted party.

No finder’s fee. No conflict of interest.

We neither negotiate on deal terms, recommend or advise on deal merit. We are not a securities broker. We are not an M&A advisor. We do not try to influence our clients and do not take a commission, enabling us to avoid any potential conflict of interest and to focus exclusively on finding the best prospective matches and making the most suitable introductions for our clients.